Sorry, I’ve just got to overtake this bastard,” says Slutty Cheff, the anonymous internet cook, amid a cacophony of engine revs as she hurtles down the motorway on the way to therapy. It’s a characteristically chaotic outing to accompany her on. But counselling is a must today; it’s a matter of hours until the release of Tart – her debut book, a memoir that heralds Slutty as a cross between Anthony Bourdain and Lena Dunham. “I would never say that,” she demurs when I bring up the comparisons. “I mean, I would. But not out loud.”
Slutty made a (user)name for herself on Instagram (@sluttycheff) in 2023, when she began lifting the lid on the sex and drug culture of London’s restaurant scene. The stories, salacious and anonymous, quickly garnered her a loyal following of 44,000 people hungry for the next slice. While her face may be concealed (most often by a burger emoji), every other detail – the thrusts, kisses, and bites – is laid out unashamedly for her fans to ogle at.
This public hedonism (“I’m just spewing out words”) has landed Slutty, now 27, a column in Vogue as well as a book deal for Tart, which she wrote in snatches of time between gruelling kitchen shifts at top restaurants. It comes at a time of increased interest in kitchen culture. There’s the Jeremy Allen White-fronted Emmy-winning series The Bear and Anya Taylor-Joy’s dark comedy The Menu, not to mention the smorgasbord of foodie Instagram accounts that make fresh produce look like a luxury fashion campaign. The memoir follows her life over four tumultuous years of shagging, cheffing, and eating. “A lot of it is just like intrusive thoughts you’d never say out loud,” she says of the “self-indulgent” copy. “I can be quite the prude in person.”
Alongside the sexcapades, Tart offers a rare insight into the notoriously male world of kitchens as a female chef. Slutty left her first restaurant after having a panic attack in the toilet. At another job, she was sexually harassed by a repulsive colleague called Victor, who would stroke her bum anytime he walked past. “There’ll be days where you feel your womanhood,” she says. “You know, a couple of men are being boisterous and loud and making weird jokes. You’re on day one of your period, hot, and someone accidentally elbows your boob – that’s a day where you’re like, ‘F*** off.’ And then, obviously, there’s the more severe end of the spectrum,” she continues. As the only woman in the kitchen, Slutty didn’t report her colleague for the inappropriate touching: “I personally felt like I didn’t want to show any kind of weakness.”
Slutty, who has been plagued by severe anxiety attacks for a large chunk of her twenties, is anything but weak. Multiple times in the book, she starts over: new man, new restaurant. She knows it’s a sick cycle, attributing her masochistic career to a “weird bug” in her head that makes her want to work 16-hour shifts frying chips in 40-degree heat when she could be “in a f***ing beer garden” with her friends, who can slope off to Pilates in the middle of their work days. That said, she encourages any woman with the same unhinged disposition to join her in the kitchen. “I think male chefs need exposure therapy to women,” she says. “It’s f***ing tough, but it’s great. Once you’re in the door, I really don’t think it’s about gender, whether or not you last. It’s about personality.”
The posh Londoner (Slutty comes from a “privileged” background) has a gift for making hellish landscapes sound fun. Dating in the age of Hinge and Tinder feels borderline sadistic. But the hot, happy way she describes snogging in the street with an older man, or getting out of a sex slump with a man-bunned bartender, makes singlehood suddenly seem tantalising. Down the line, she yells at me with the militant zeal of a life coach: “Everyone should just get the f*** off the apps. Get the f*** off their phones and go and have real-life experiences. If you cook more food, you eat more food! How do you learn about love and dating? You meet more people and f*** more people. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“This dating thing is crazy – it’s like a full-time job,” she continues, “You need an Outlook diary just to manage your communications. I think, just prioritise sex over everything else. Because, at whatever age, dating seems sad. It sounds arduous and depressing. So, you might as well get some sex from it.”
It was with this mantra that Slutty landed her “first ever” boyfriend, who messaged her on Instagram back when she only had 800 followers. “We both worked in restaurants fairly near each other, so we went for a drink,” she recalls. “Obviously, he didn’t know what I looked like, which I really liked, because it was like a modern-day old-school romance, you know, writing to each other.”
Of course, men sliding into her DM aren’t always so PG. “The creepiest it gets is like some middle-aged gouty man messaging me being like, ‘Have you ever heard of St John?” she says, referring to the fashionable east London eatery. (Of course, she’s heard of St John.) “But one time I did get a d*** pic. It was this scrawny teenage boy, and he sent me a picture of him and Marco Pierre White. I’m like, OK, cool, what do you want me to do with this? Print it off and frame it? I didn’t reply and five minutes later he followed up with a [penis] picture.”
Slutty believes food, sex and love go hand in hand, and her book, a delicious emulsification of the three, is proof. What’s dinner but a dating initiation, asks Slutty. It tells you all you need to know about the person sitting across the table from you: “Are they shy and fumbling? Or are they greedy bastards?” The first meal she made for her boyfriend was a baguette filled with Frazzles and butter. “He’s better at cooking than me, which f***ing pisses me off,” she admits.
Tart will undoubtedly lead to more eyes on Slutty, who’s feeling “anxious” having had a taste of celebrity chefdom with recent photoshoots in the pages of Vogue and The Times. The only identifiable characteristic in those pictures is her curled auburn hair, which she swiftly lobbed off into a bob the moment the cameras stopped rolling. “It’s a basic level of rejuvenating your life and starting over again from scratch,” she says of her new look.
Slutty’s Instagram claims that once she reaches 1 million followers, she’ll reveal her identity. It’s a bit of a white lie, she confesses now. “I would just continue to delete one follower for eternity so it’s constantly 999,999,” she says. “I don’t have any interest in showing my face – it doesn’t have anything to do with the writing.” She, fundamentally, also doesn’t have time to become a celebrity. Ahead of the book’s release, Slutty is already penning a TV adaptation of Tart, which Lena Dunham may or may not be interested in working on. “She’s amazing,” Slutty says of the Girls creator who recently released her latest series, Too Much, on Netflix. “But we’ll have to see really, with contracts and timing. She’s doing so much.”
Slutty is already penning her second book; “if I stop [writing] then I get weird”. When I ask whether she’d ever kill off the persona that made her and start anew, she’s candid: “I kind of want to,” Slutty says, her engine clunking through a three-point turn. “But the thing is, I’m a commercial bitch at the end of the day… If I got rid of it and started from scratch, who’s going to say anyone would care about the real version of me?”
‘Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef’ by Slutty Cheff is out on 17 July via Bloomsbury Publishing
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