Editorial Content for Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef

There is almost always a point in the evening when someone asks, “How was your day?” I have the sort of job where I work with people, so normally this is a tale of human folly --- sometimes my own but thankfully not often. People being people, I am usually left to tell short, amusing stories about co-workers forgetting the code to use the copier, or sending emails that were not thoroughly thought-out. “Quotidian” is probably the word, not to mention “bland” or, for most days, “utterly mind-meltingly dull.”

TART is a chronicle of 12 days in the life of a London-based junior chef. In her first role, she is put to the task of cutting up an enormous stack of chili peppers --- not just cutting them, but brunoising them, which is a fancy French term for dicing them. (Technically, you julienne the peppers, creating long strips, and then you turn them into uniform little cubes.) If you’re a junior chef in a large, busy kitchen, you do just an ungodly amount of this kind of work. It is, well, quotidian, bland and dull, and one wonders how someone gets a book out of this sort of thing.

"This is a deeply observed book, especially in terms of both the food and the process of getting that food to the pass and from there out to the kitchen."

Part of it is that the anonymous author (who glories in the Instagram handle “Slutty Cheff”) is an unknowing disciple of Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, who wrote a wonderful book called FLOW back in 1990 about the state of concentration and focus that you get when you are working hard to complete repetitive tasks. There is a lot here about being caught up in the rhythms of the kitchen, getting the garnish just so, putting together an attractive plate over and over again.

But TART shines brightest when Slutty Cheff brings that level of focus and detail to her writing. This is a deeply observed book, especially in terms of both the food and the process of getting that food to the pass and from there out to the kitchen. The complexity of cooking in a high-end kitchen is only matched by the author’s shifting emotional state, which veers in multiple directions, often at the same time. Even something as simple as riding her bicycle from her apartment to her current restaurant elicits a thunderstorm of conflicting emotions, which spill out onto the page like rivulets of balsamic vinegar on a granite countertop.

One subtext of TART is the concept of taking on the cooking profession as a form of emotional regulation. I was reminded frequently of Laura Hillenbrand’s description of wandering Depression-era jockeys, who were living their lives “all the way up,” working in a dangerous profession and using every opportunity to blow off steam by carousing. There is --- how shall I put this --- an immense amount of carousing in TART, if that’s the word for it. This is a deeply carnal book, both in terms of the pleasures of the flesh and…those other pleasures of the flesh, if you know what I mean. (She calls herself “Slutty Cheff,” so that’s at least some kind of clue for you.)

To the extent that there’s a plot to the book outside of the essential waywardness of its heroine, it has to do with whether or not working in a kitchen is really such a good idea for the people who are driven to work in kitchens. Obviously you have to be drawn to difficult, repetitive work, handling double shifts, dealing with fussy customers and villainous head chefs. It’s a place in the world for people who otherwise might not have a place. That is all to the good, but is it truly worthwhile? Can you find peace that way? There’s not a good answer here, but maybe peace is overrated. Perhaps food and sex (as long as it's really good food and really good sex) is the way to go.