The Secret Sex Lives of Chefs

Books, TV shows, fan clubs—celebrity chefs are now rocks stars, writes Gael Greene, including all the perks that status affords: sex and groupies. Plus, VIEW OUR GALLERY of hot chefs.

Plus: Check out Hungry Beast, for more news on the latest restaurants, hot chefs, and tasty recipes.

Do chefs make better lovers? I get asked that question a lot. Because a foodie is a mouth with a vestigial person attached, one might think so. Indeed the skills and emotions involved in producing a great meal are exactly those at play in making great sex: passion, timing, sensitivity, the adventurous appetite, the brilliant chance of pace, the shock of surprise. All the senses that register pleasure at the table come into play in bed—the smell of sun on skin, the pop of salmon roe on your tongue, the crunch of celery in the same ear that registers the moan of ecstasy or a dirty word.

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Alas, in my modest experience over the past 40 years, chefs are like most men, but with varicose veins and impossible hours. There are masters and journeyman and hapless apprentices.

But in that same time, while the chefs may not have evolved as lovers, the country has changed around them: America’s dining revolution has given chefs unimagined opportunities. As more people became obsessed with good food, chefs became celebrities. They got TV shows, their own network. They’ve become rock stars, with all the trappings. Fan clubs, sex, groupies.

“It’s very tempting,” Jean-Georges Vongerichten admits. “All day you see women coming for your food, looking at you that way. After all, food is sexy. But I’m married now. Of course when I was single…yes… though I’m not the sort of person to put a scoreboard over my bed.”

Adds a woman in media involved with chefs on display, “I couldn’t possibly tell you what I’ve seen on the road.”

Hunger, the title of the new memoir from John De Lucie, head chef at Graydon Carter’s snooty New York clubhouse, the Waverly Inn, seems to say it all for him. “It isn’t sex women want so much as they want a meal,” explains De Lucie. “They want a man who can cook. I’ve been in the business 20 years now. And the same gorgeous hostess is still available, she’s still 25, six feet tall, wanting me to teach her how to cook. Most accountants and lawyers don’t have that in the office. With me, dinner comes first, then sex. I don’t want to be here the day food replaces sex.”

De Lucie is onto something, as even mere mortal men have caught on, cooking now as they weren’t in my days of delicious excess. It’s seductive to watch a man cook…it shows their softer side, their sense of beauty and taste, their mastery of knife skills and igniting a flame. Maybe the cheese course is followed by dessert between the sheets. I remember watching the great chef Jean Troisgros from Roanne flinging a sheet of puff pastry in the air and feeling my toes curl it was so sexy. The interlude between sharing him with an adoring cooking class and retreating to our cottage was simmering fork play.