Book Review: Tart by Slutty Cheff

I am not on social media, so Tart is my first exposure to Slutty Cheff, the pseudonymous Instagram minor-celebrity whose posts about being a woman on the London restaurant scene earned her a column in British Vogue and a book deal. Perhaps a way of understanding whether/how much I like Tart is by asking whether I would follow Cheff’s account if I were to join the platform. The answer is yes, but more because I find anything to do with food interesting, rather than because her memoir is so brilliant.

Our anonymous chef begins the book having quit her corporate job and with it an illicit love affair with a senior colleague, to move back in with her parents and go to cookery school in the hopes that a career in food will be the remedy for the depression and despair that have overtaken her. The new direction takes her into the male-dominated world of restaurant kitchens, where she finds a predictably manic, draining, yet fulfilling departure from the nine-to-five of office life, working alongside an equally predictable mix of decent guys, chauvinists, weirdos and sex-pests. We move from her first kitchen in Islington to a tiny operation in Cornwall, following a burned-out woman fleeing the capital, then back to the city she realises she is in love with, into the kitchen of a London institution. We were promised food and sex, and the author gives us glimpses of three relationships, all ultimately flawed.

The book’s subtitle is ‘Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef’, and everything from the title to the pseudonym to the writer’s early declaration that ‘I like too much and I always have’, combined to give me high hopes that I would read something simultaneously dramatic, revealing, salacious and intoxicating. Sadly, while there is drama and sex and intoxication, there really isn’t any revelation. The dodgy chefs are largely characterless, and the nice ones are just nice. The depressive episodes read much like every self-indulgent piece of middle-of-the-road autofiction currently doing the rounds. What saves the book is the food and the city. Slutty Cheff’s depictions of actual cookery are crisp and compelling, while her attachment to the sensory experience of London shines through in several memorable passages.

In the end, it is probably a good thing that I am not the kind of person who demands ‘too much’, because if I were my verdict would have to be that Tart offers not enough. As it is, there were enough vivid descriptions of life as a young chef to ensure a few pleasant hours of reading, despite the book’s flaws. I doubt I’ll be watching the TV adaptation, though.