Thought Pieces

Are Foodies Still Having Sex?

Photo: istockphoto

As if that blind item about a celebrity chef’s harem didn’t settle it, Gael Greene wonders whether sexytime has vanished from the food world. First, she says chefs aren’t particularly good lovers, though yes, she agrees with John DeLucie that cooking is seductive (“maybe the cheese course is followed by dessert between the sheets”). Gael then talks to some chefs who seem too married and/or too wary of exposure to be naughty (then there’s Jonathan Waxman’s reason for not hooking up with younger women: “You have to talk to them afterward”), and she writes, “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.” So basically, tweet tweet is the new skeet skeet. (Sorry, had to.)

There may be some truth to this, but come on, at the end of the day we’re still talking about candlelit restaurants and free-flowing wine (to saying nothing of trendy tequila cocktails and porny boxed wines). Plus, restaurants have better music now! To paraphrase a song we don’t want to hear at dinner, people are still having sex. In fact, last night at the Harrison (speaking of restaurants with great playlists), the delightful crispy troutlings didn’t stop a certain couple from sucking face at the bar.

At the end of the day, also, foodie-ism is an easy way to connect with people — among a certain set, it’s a lot easier to bond over how much they like the anchovy and olive at DBGB (described as sex on toast by our dinner date, a friend who ended up clocking a stranger’s digits after chatting him up about his beer choice), or better yet, who has the best pizza in town, than to sustain a conversation about the situation in Iran. Gael says people are too busy tipping off blogs to engage in “fork play” (um … ) but on the other hand, those blogs offer conversation fodder. Yesterday we met a woman who works in wine, who (unaware that we had written about it) told us how much she wanted to go to Ed Mitchell’s Beard House dinner. Obviously, we were on the same page. If we were smooth like that, we might have asked her, “Did you know that popcorn increases libido?” Of course, what did we end up doing that night? Well, we went cruising. That is, we cruised by Trattoria Cinque to see if it had opened yet in the old Devin Tavern space. It hasn’t.

The Secret Sex Lives of Chefs [Daily Beast]

Are Foodies Still Having Sex?