Slutty Cheff is an anonymous chef-turned-author who most recently wrote a novel called Tart (2026). Set against the high-octane backdrop of a few modern professional kitchens in London, the novel operates on a currency of secrets and alliances. On the surface, it’s about a woman navigating life as a chef—fair play to her; it sounds exhausting. But she goes through boyfriends faster than she does vegetables. It is a little bit on the uncomfortable side to hear an anonymous woman boldly describe every aspect of her sex life and fantasies, but I could not put the book down. Vogue praised the book as one “to be inhaled in one sitting”—of course, though, it’s worth proceeding with a bit of caution when a former employee lands a glowing endorsement from her old magazine right on the front cover. Nepotism or not, the blurb wasn't wrong. I devoured the novel. At its core, her gossip is not simply idle chatter or throwaway comments made in the heat of a fiery moment, but something that workers in intense jobs also crave—relief. As someone who has worked in hospitality, it’s easy to imagine the flavours of these stories, ringing painfully true. But if you’re a hospitality worker, former hospitality worker, or someone who has never worked in hospitality, you flip through the pages more and more and question why on earth you are reading such a novel, wondering: why is it such a guilty pleasure to enjoy this type of book?
It’s easy to write it off as voyeurism, but our impulse to eavesdrop reflects something far more fundamental: a deep, almost primal human appetite to watch people navigate the brink of social and professional ruin. But the social architecture of Tart is nothing modern at all – and Slutty Cheff owes most of her success to the women who came before her. Many of our most revered canonical texts are dependent on the assumption that one person’s private struggle is destined to become another’s entertainment. We are, by design, positioned as eavesdroppers.
Jane Austen was constructing social spaces that were structurally identical to these high-stakes kitchens two hundred years ago: both are arenas governed by strict and unforgiving codes of conduct, and both could end a career or social life. Consider Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, for instance. We don’t actually access the central, mythic romance of Catherine and Heathcliff directly, instead we receive it filtered through Nelly, the housekeeper gossiping to a bored, convalescing tenant. Nelly had nothing better to do and neither did the tenant, so both engaged in a discussion about the household, and produced quite a lengthy story through it too. It’s essentially the 1800s version of Gossip Girl—another omnipresent, semi-anonymous observer feeding private scandals to an outsider eager for a bit of entertainment. I couldn’t believe it was Dan.
Slutty Cheff named and shamed everyone else, all while hiding behind a pseudonym. Anyone can bet that the names of chefs and waitresses are almost certainly altered too, mainly to maintain anonymity as she spills the tea while keeping her own cup safe. By pointing this out, I don’t mean to condemn her at all—I can imagine the backlash she’d get if anyone were to find out. But this anonymous writing is as old as print itself. It does make you wonder, though, about how the meaning of female anonymity has shifted over time. What does this anonymity mean for Slutty Cheff now? More so, what did it mean historically for women? While it is understandable, Slutty Cheff’s choice to remain anonymous seems more of a marketing ploy than anything else, for women in the past, it could have been a prerequisite for survival. Mary Ann Evans wrote her novels under the pseudonym ‘George Eliot’ to be taken seriously by a patriarchal literary market that dismissed women’s writing as trivial. Now, the trivial topic in Tart is the men around her—quite literally turning the tables. But putting a name on the page for those like the Brontë sisters meant scandal, desire, total exile.
Consider the sheer force of modern prison memoirs written by women—raw and unashamed full-throttle storytelling. Piper Kerman wrote Orange Is the New Black and attached her real name to some of the darkest and most vulnerable or stigmatised experiences. There is no protective buffer if a writer chooses to use their name; just taking it as it comes, as if to say ‘this is how it happened, and this is how it is’.
Our brains are fundamentally wired to hate the unknown, to fill in the blanks, demand an explanation and to turn our noses up at uncertainty. We invent a plot, assign blame and speculate endlessly, all to feel better about ourselves and our lives. It’s the same cognitive itch that drives people down internet conspiracy rabbit holes and Flat Earth theories. When faced with a void or a closed door, we look to others’ misfortune to make sense of our own. Schadenfreude. My divorce isn’t that bad, at least my husband didn’t cheat on me. Or, I’ve been placed on sabbatical from work, but it’s a good job my boss didn’t sack me altogether. There is an expressive Spanish saying that I was recently introduced to by an English student of mine: hace más desafiante o retante, le pone más sabor al desafío. Together, we struggled to work out what he meant as the phrase translates quite poorly into English. We could say something like “The harder the challenge, the more flavoursome it becomes”, but it’s not something I’d say on a daily basis, if I’m honest, and makes me wonder if we ever encounter a particular equivalent in English. The phrase is used when high stakes elevate a narrative, when something makes the situation more challenging, adding a sudden, necessary flavour to the ordeal. It sounds to my non-Spanish-speaking untrained palate like the exact secret sauce of a Kardashian plot twist; some form of scandal or secret affair, a leaked text between two people who shouldn’t be texting, or whispered conversation caught on camera. What the Spanish saying demonstrates to us is that we don’t just endure the heat of someone else's fire; we crave the seasoning it adds to the story.
The best thing about gossip is its hostility towards the truth. Real life is so often boring, beige, flat, anticlimactic. It’s the reason why ‘non-fiction’ books are never 100% true to the story. Facts are tethered to the tedious reality of what actually happened, but gossip is given free reign, unburdened, to give us what should have happened, but didn’t. When James Frey published A Million Little Pieces (2003), his infamous memoir of addiction, time in prison and rehab, he knew full well he was selling a cleverly constructed lie. The reality was that he spent an unremarkable four hours sitting in a police station. But the version he gave us was more mythic: a hardened fugitive who spent 87 days in a high-security prison, complete with violent and bloody brawls and undergoing root canal surgery without anaesthesia. He offered us the antihero we were all rooting for, only retreating behind the shield of “semi-fiction” after Oprah forced him into such a box.
The most fantastic thing here is how easily we let him get away with it, at least for a while. No one wants the bureaucratic reality of a man in a holding cell. They want blood and grit. Lies are always so much more entertaining than the truth. Nobody checks the receipts on a story when the drama is so tantalising. I wasn’t necessarily angry that he lied; I was more bitter at having to trade this thrilling story for a dull reality. He forced us to remember how boring the real world actually is.
When gossip is spoken aloud, it’s fleeting. You forget about it ten seconds later and move onto the next thing. But when it’s written down, it’s permanent. It becomes a story. As Barbara Walters wrote in her memoir Audition, "Show me a person who doesn’t like a little gossip and I’ll show you a person who has no interest in human beings". We are so invested in the lives of others that we make up stories that are juicy, full of plot twists and turns, self-inflicted ruin, messy events, and gloriously bad decisions. Nobody would buy a book where nothing happens. We need these stories to escape the messy lives of our own. We are so obsessively, beautifully fascinated by the lives of others that when reality leaves a gap, we cultivate stories like they’re papier-mâché, filled with twists, bad decisions, brilliant dialogues, messy politics, and gloriously, unapologetically human drama—even if they aren’t entirely true.
There is a sharp observation about our hypocrisy behind all of this. We can call it ‘gossip’ when it’s told over a drink, and we pretend to be above it. Laughing at others’ misfortune, gawking at their collapse, clucking our tongues at their bad decisions, though we don’t understand the full story anyway. But wrap this exact same concoction of human messiness in an anonymous novel, a 19th-century classic, or a glossy sexy memoir, and suddenly it’s literature. It’s art. It’s not trashy or mean anymore, but it’s elegant. The medium changes, but the appetite never does. Maybe it’s not so bad if we spill the tea every once in a while. It’s what literature has been doing for three hundred years anyway.