As a reader of "TART," you may have come for the promise of unabashed shagging and haute cuisine, but stay for the writing, which is crisp and unapologetic, a hard dive into an excess of just about everything. “I’m a greedy person at my core,” our protagonist writes right up front. “I don’t want my job to be a means to an end; I want it to be a pilgrimage of passion.”

When it comes to food, she likens herself to a starved pig employed to crunch through human bones. “I don’t want to eat,” she writes, “I want to devour. I don’t want to have dinner; I want to dine. I don’t want my oyster to be the size of a little snot rocket; I want it to be a fleshy bulbous pearl swimming in an iridescent sea of salty juice.”

She approaches her sex life with the same amount of ferocity. She wants to be consumed, inhaled. She doesn’t want orgasms; she wants a paroxysm of pleasure, her partner a wild boar. “I’m addicted to this feeling,” she says, taking a last drag of a cigarette in the alley behind the restaurant where she is trying to be a purposeful cook, a chef. But if you start to think this girl is too tough to be relatable, she is also blinking back tears. “I’m in the kitchen,” she says on the very first page, and, “I’m scared.”

Slutty Cheff is the nom de plume of a London food critic and columnist, and "TART" is a memoir and behind-the-scenes tell-all of life in the kitchens of some of London’s best restaurants. But it’s not just a book about cooking; it’s Ms. Cheff’s confessional and introspective study of falling in love, heartache, family and friendship. Her texts with her dad keep her mildly sane; her friends keep her tethered to the ground where she finds her footing in a male-dominated industry with long hours of grueling labor, hot tempers, late-night boozing, and sex — some explosive, some disappointing, some tender.

Ms. Cheff came to all this voluntarily, abandoning a 9-to-5 office career to find her heart’s place in kitchens where she suffers cuts and burns and hangovers, but also a satisfaction of that hunger she cannot rid herself of. Peeling the skin of roasted peppers, she burns her fingertips. “The flesh is soft and slippery; it’s wet and wild, dying to join the pleasure party in the pan.”

She collects the hot, wet seeds in her hands. “I feel like a sexy witch making potions,” she writes. “I am ready to poison the village with pleasure.”

Sometimes it’s hard to separate Slutty Cheff’s passions: for food, for sex, for the city of London or riding her bicycle through the dark and the rain. They all seem similarly honest and almost sweetly lascivious.

Readers don’t have to share Ms. Cheff’s passions quite so literally, but an entire paragraph describing the glowing, oily scales of a fish being filleted or a page devoted to the anticipation and culmination of practically explosive love-making may make almost any reader a fan of this young woman — who loves food, her family, her friends, the night sky, sex flashbacks and a soft spring breeze through an open window. You can’t help but like her.

Ms. Cheff once wondered if she should identify as a chef or a writer. Readers may not have sampled her cooking, but by page 20 of "TART," it’s pretty clear that she can honestly call herself a writer.

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