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 bedâthe 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.
Click Image To View Gallery

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: Americaâs 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. Theyâve become rock stars, with all the trappings. Fan clubs, sex, groupies.
âItâs very tempting,â Jean-Georges Vongerichten admits. âAll day you see women coming for your food, looking at you that way. After all, food is sexy. But Iâm married now. Of course when I was singleâŚyes⌠though Iâm not the sort of person to put a scoreboard over my bed.â
Adds a woman in media involved with chefs on display, âI couldnât possibly tell you what Iâve seen on the road.â
Hunger, the title of the new memoir from John De Lucie, head chef at Graydon Carterâs snooty New York clubhouse, the Waverly Inn, seems to say it all for him. âIt isnât sex women want so much as they want a meal,â explains De Lucie. âThey want a man who can cook. Iâve been in the business 20 years now. And the same gorgeous hostess is still available, sheâs still 25, six feet tall, wanting me to teach her how to cook. Most accountants and lawyers donât have that in the office. With me, dinner comes first, then sex. I donât want to be here the day food replaces sex.â
De Lucie is onto something, as even mere mortal men have caught on, cooking now as they werenât in my days of delicious excess. Itâs seductive to watch a man cookâŚit 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.
I did find one pro, a restaurateur at the center of the star-chef game, who pines for the old days, and had some decent reasons. âItâs not like the '80s anymore,â he says. âItâs too dangerous to take risks. The camera is always watching. Someone will sue or write about it. They are more groupies than ever, but for people my age, some of us married now, weâve grown out of it.â
âAll day you see women coming for your food, looking at you that way. After all, food is sexy.â
I suppose that monogamy is admirable, but it saddens me. Opportunity abounds, yet the libido is muffled by hunger, propriety, and fear. I hope it doesnât extend to the young and single. I worry that the lust that drove earlier generations from disco to bed seems too focused now on food, shopping (organica and leafy local greens), cooking and eating out ,and endless blogging about it. I canât believe that anyone has the time for advanced love-makingâ changing the sheets, soaking in a scented bath, setting up a favorite porn film. If the newbies are born already attached to a keyboard and their parents spend those midlife-crisis years at the computer, or scouting plywood sheathing coming down on new restaurants and texting gossip to Eater and Gawker⌠where does erotic adventure fit in? A Yelp is not like an orgasmic moan, or maybe to some it is. As for the compulsion to Tweet. Tweeting does not lead to kissing like dancing did. Whatever became of infidelity in the afternoonâwould one Tweet it afterward with a euphemism or a rating?
Such is the price of fame, it seems. As a woman who is proud that I had the creativity to spend an infamous afternoon with Elvis Presley, the thought of chefs as rock stars amuses me. âWill you be having fun with your groupies?â I playfully ask Jonathan Waxman, who has cooked everywhere from Alice Watersâ Chez Panisse in Berkeley to his own Barbuto in New York, as he headed for the Food and Wine Festival in Aspen. He protests: âNo. Oh no. Iâm too old. Iâm an old married man.â
âBut young women love older men,â I said.
Jonathan smiled and shook his head. âBut then you have to talk to them afterward.â Spoken like a celebrity.
Plus: Check out Hungry Beast, for more news on the latest restaurants, hot chefs, and tasty recipes.
A New York restaurant critic for 40 years and author of seven books (two bestselling novels, a sex guide and a memoir: Insatiable: Tales from a Life of Delicious Excess ), Gael Greeneâs reviews and archives can be found at her Web site.