Food, sex, and fine art
Sexy still life paintings, anonymity in the kitchen, a female chef on the 'Chef Daddy' trope, Gillian Anderson wants you to be aroused, a podcast rec, a book rec, and non-alcoholic cocktail recipes!
Hello hello!
I hope you’re having a fabulous week! New York’s plagued with rats, Paris with bedbugs, but we’ve still got beautiful weather here in San Seb (high 70s low 80s, and sunny!) - and you’re reading another edition of the Drink Seco newsletter!
On a personal note, Kate and I will be temporarily heading back to the States to start our renovation project (just in time for winter!) I’m always sad any time I have to leave Donostia, but I’m incredibly excited about this project as it’s an amazing opportunity to get my hands dirty again.
The switch from owning restaurants to working remotely took a huge toll on my strength and movement, and I really love working with my hands, and seeing projects to completion! Hopefully, by the next newsletter, I’ll have some fun before and afters for you!
I saw Past Lives this week! And wow. What a beautiful film! It has been a long time since a movie moved me like this did. Such a beautiful, very human story, handled so gently. The story, the acting, the cinematography, the soundtrack, the characters, I cannot fault it. I’ll be thinking about it for the next little while, that’s for sure. It’s also sometimes nice to have a reminder that you’re exactly where you’re meant to be.
This week as always, I’ll share all the scrumptious things I’ve been reading and consuming. On the menu:
The Slutty Chef
Food, fetishism, and fine art
Gillian Anderson ladies and gentleman
Alicia Kennedy’s new book
Podcast rec: Off Menu
Non-alcoholic cocktail recipes
The Slutty Chef:
The Slutty Chef (her instagram handle) is a young London female cook writing, and posting anonymously about food, sex, and working in a male-dominated industry. Think of her as the Carrie Bradshaw of London’s culinary scene. I’ve been following her Instagram for a while now, often chuckling at her commentary of the industry and hospo world.
After calling out celebrity chef Thomas Straker in a satirical instagram post for hiring a stream of identical white men to work at his restaurant, she wrote an article for Vogue titled: As A Woman Cook, I’m Well And Truly Done With The Fetishisation Of “Chef Daddies”.
And my boys don’t relate to the “hot chef” thing either. In fact, they cringe at it. I’m so devastatingly sorry to tell you that the whole “chef daddy” character, for the most part, is totally fictional. Chefs are weirdos. We are people that opt to spend ludicrous amounts of time away from the people we love, in a sweaty dungeon, surrounded by fire and knives. We are not the sexy jocks; we are the music goths. Most of the male chefs I know are chubby, funny, lovable blokes with a passion for memes and saying sorry to their girlfriends. They are not doing shots of vodka and lines of coke like Andy from Boiling Point; they are picking herbs while discussing what their late-night KFC order is.
“The industry has been trying to move beyond this toxicity (albeit at the pace of a fucking sloth), and your fetishising men with anger issues and egomaniac tendencies isn’t helping us women.”
Following the Slutty Chef and reading her commentary on the fetishization of chefs has also gotten me thinking about anonymity in the food world. As with everything these days, increasingly chefs, restaurants, and bars need an online (or rather, social media) presence. We’ve also seen the rise of ‘Chef Daddies’ (a few months ago I spoke about the hugely popular erotic cooking tiktoks) and a growing interest in the lives of chefs (think of the stream of cooking/hospo TV shows and movies the past two years). As consumers our expectations have changed, we want to know who’s cooking our food, their life story, their politics, the making of our food, and what’s going on back of house. We want to know where recipes came from, and what (or who) inspired them. For many, hospitality is a distant, (often romanticized) other world operating in the back of house, on opposite hours to most. It’s natural to be intrigued. I also get from the other side, posting and making your customers feel like they have a relationship with the people cooking their food is good for business. However, many people gravitate to back-of-house jobs, precisely because they’re that. Tucked away from customers. (Contrast this with bartending and waitressing- the extrovert’s dream).
I also love seeing this other side to the lives of chefs and the restaurants I’m supporting, the produce arrives, or some hints at the menu for the night. Further, isn’t this what we’re calling for? For people to be more concerned with where their food is coming from and how it’s made?
In saying this, I’ve found Slutty Chef’s anonymity refreshing in the sometimes overwhelming sea of Instagram chef accounts and hospitality hot takes. For the most part, the Slutty Chef posts stories of her day at work, her love life, and knock-off meals with a humor and cynicism that makes me chuckle, and feels so true to the industry.
Food, fetishism, and fine art:
Speaking of food and fetishism, food has always been a fascination of still-life fine artists. However, while they might have gone out of vogue for a little while, it seems still-life paintings of food are having a renaissance.
Interested in our changing relationship with food, dining, and desire, these paintings often encompass a duality of emotions we experience when it comes to food.
The tension between these two opposing feelings is interesting to explore in the context of growing ethical debates about the consumption of food (particularly animal products), something where desire and disgust are intertwined with our consumption.
I wrote about the ‘horror’ of food a few newsletters ago, sharing some photographs from A24’s book ‘Horror Caviar’. This week I thought I’d focus on the sensuality in a lot of these paintings.
Gillian Anderson ladies and gentlemen:
If there’s one thing queer women love, it’s Gillian Anderson.
And if there’s one thing about this newsletter, it’s that I’ll find a way to bring queer culture and drinking/food culture together.
This announcement practically fell into my lap. Gillian Anderson has recently launched ‘Arouse’ from her company G Spot. G Spot makes “natural soft drinks filled to the brim with life-enhancing adaptogens and nootropics”. Their new ‘Arouse’ drinks are a plant-based libido-enhancing soft drink launched in partnership with Netflix’s season 4 of Sex Education.
“Passionfruit, White Peach and Habanero, blended expertly with functional ingredients, including: Butterfly Pea (Clitoria ternatea), a plant species used in traditional medicine as an aphrodisiac; I-Arginine and I-Citrulline, amino acids which increase blood flow to sexual organs to improve libido; and Vitamin B6, a nutrient that regulates sexual hormones.”
The new line also includes drinks ‘Protect’, ‘Lift’, and ‘Soothe’. All hope to promote open discussions about wellness and sexuality.
Drinks claiming to boost arousal are not new to the market, I’m yet to personally try Gillian’s, but consider me intrigued! And if anyone’s tried it let me know! I’d love to hear your thoughts!
Alicia Kennedy’s new book:
You all know how much I rave about Alicia Kennedy’s substack From the Desk, and the incredibly thought-provoking discussions of politics, ethical dilemmas, colonization, climate change, and social justice she raises. Things that are inextricable from our eating and drinking cultures and lifestyles yet are often neglected in food journalism.
Her new book No Meat Required: The Cultural History and Culinary Future of Plant-Based Eating is a “celebration and critique of the last 50 or so years of veg-based food and the philosophies that have underpinned it. It’s about politics and subcultures”. Through this, she interrogates the difference between food/lifestyle journalism and scientific journalism.
Alicia says she “researched what stops people from pursuing a plant-based diet or limiting their meat consumption, and I’ve found ways to thread the findings into my writing. I try to meet the objections head-on, without explicitly naming them.”
What I found interesting was that studies show “removing vegetarian and vegan labels from menus could help guide US consumers towards reduced consumption of animal products.”
I’ll definitely be checking this out!
Podcast rec: Off Menu
I have a food-ish podcast recommendation for you all, and long-time readers know how much I love to throw in even slightly food-related recs to this newsletter. Off Menu is a podcast by comedians Ed Gamble and James Acaster where they invite special guests into their magical restaurant to each choose their favorite starter, main course, side dish, dessert, and drink. Desert Island Discs for dining.
Some of their guests include some big names like Florence Pugh (actress of the moment), Jamie Oliver (domestic goddess), Paul Mescal (aka the internet’s Princess Diana), Yotam Ottolenghi (food royalty), Lily Allen (queen), Bob Mortimer (one of the funniest guys out there), Louis Theroux (need I say more?),Miriam Margolyes (indisputable icon), and Greg Davis (and come to think of it, most of the Taskmasters contestants from over the years), I could go on.
Even as someone who spends a lot of time exploring, thinking, and writing about food, this podcast still somehow remains refreshing, funny, and interesting.
The time has come! For my paid subscribers, thank you so much for supporting this newsletter! If you have enjoyed reading along, I would like to ask you to please subscribe! To continue receiving bi-weekly recipes, I’d also ask you to consider a paid subscription (only $4.17/month!) Thank you again for reading! :)