He leans over a sizzling saucepan, wearing a well-fitting T-shirt that shows off his tattooed arms. To protect his T-shirt (ones that make your arms look that good don’t come cheap), he is wearing an apron – dark denim, or maybe even leather, but definitely some kind of masculine fabric, a bit blacksmith-adjacent. He rakes back his hair from an aesthetically sweat-beaded brow and frowns in concentration as he adjusts the seasoning. Mmmm, delicious. Is this making you hungry? Or is it making you … “thirsty”, as the kids say?
The hot chef, lust-object de nos jours, is about to get even hotter. The second series of The Bear, already streaming in the US and available in the UK from 19 July, brings grouchy-yet-inexplicably-adorable chef “Carmy” Berzatto, played by Jeremy Allen White, back to our screens just as summer hits its peak. Oh, and if you have a sweet tooth, you may be interested to hear about the new guest star – pastry chef Luca, played by 30-year-old British actor Will Poulter, who told Variety magazine he “literally begged to be in the show” to realise “a dream of playing a chef on TV” and that he has an “immense amount of respect” for people in the food and service industry. To prepare for the role, Poulter spent time in the kitchen at the London restaurants St John, Black Axe Mangal (now F.K.A.B.A.M.), and Trullo. He described one particular shift in the Black Axe Mangal kitchen as “maybe the most satisfying day of work I’ve ever had in my life”.
In Emily in Paris, heroine Emily Cooper is an influencer, that most zeitgeisty of careers. So it stands to reason that her longest-running love interest – and the one who is French, with the sexy accent and everything, rather than cheeky British Alfie – is a chef. Gabriel wears proper starched chef’s whites in place of a T-shirt, because he’s French and they take this cooking stuff seriously there. The sleeves get rolled up a little higher with each new season.
Not all hot chefs are fictional, mind you. Rōze Traore, alumnus of the Eleven Madison Park kitchen in New York, has also modelled for Nike and Louis Vuitton. He recently opened his own restaurant in Ivory Coast, where his family have roots and where he holidayed as a child. A recent profile in W Magazine shows him at work in a stainless steel kitchen, wearing a monogrammed Dior polo shirt. Last month, large parts of the internet lost its mind for the best part of two days when Victoria Beckham shared a video of her husband, David, cooking burritos with daughter Harper in their Cotswolds kitchen, wearing a box-fresh white T-shirt accessorised with a Daylesford tea towel over one shoulder. The culturally nimble Brand Beckham, which once focused more on hand-holdy dinners à deux in Mayfair, appears to have pivoted in the cost-of-living era to home cooking, albeit with an Aga worth more than £7,000.
Chefs haven’t been this sexy since Nigella wore silk robes to lick chocolate and butterscotch from spoons. In 2023, the hot chef is primarily a male phenomenon, while talented women in the kitchen have been relegated to sidekick status (Sydney in The Bear, for instance, is beautiful, talented, funny and mostly ignored). Something about the juxtaposition of cooking and testosterone captures pop culture’s imagination. Impressive knife skills, but combined with an appreciation of flavours more subtle than charred meat and tomato ketchup, seem to represent masculinity in its current, most palatable form. The hot chef might not be averse to the odd roll-up outside the back door and could well be wearing a silver chain or an earring; but he will also put his glasses on to read a recipe and go a bit misty-eyed when he tells you about the time he ate pizza in Naples. This month, he will be getting his hands muddy foraging for samphire.
Being good at whatever the culture is currently obsessed with has always been sexy, whether that is playing football or making money. Our culture has never been so obsessed with food – a universal love language for forging connection and communication – since the rising cost of living sharpened our awareness of the price of feeding ourselves and our loved ones. Never before has a generation been identified by association with particular foods like the millennials, who, as we all know, have prioritised avocados and barista-made coffees over home ownership and having children.
Cooking used to be polarised between humdrum what’s-in-the-fridge domesticity, and an intimidating restaurant culture, where you had to know what to do with a bouquet garni, not cry if you chopped the end of your finger off and get through a 12-hour shift by going on a cocaine bender, which frankly sounded a bit much. Social media has allowed tribes to find each other around a middle ground; TikTok will patiently explain anything you could possibly need to know, from cheese toasties to chiffonading.
But still, it seems, we are not sated. A new generation of hot chefs now bubbling under seem, well, more OnlyFans than Instagram. Swiss-born pastry chef Cedrik Lorenzen has 4 million followers on TikTok and 2 million on Instagram. Cooking topless in a low-lit kitchen, he slides a finger deep into a halved grapefruit while making lascivious eye contact with the camera. It is hard to believe now that we got so hot under the collar about Nigella. By modern tastes, it seems kind of vanilla. Could you pass the hot sauce?
