Golden Angel, $2.99, ISBN 978-1005079420
Contemporary Romance, 2021
Firstly, I feel like I need to apologize on behalf of the author to all the folks out there that look at the cover of Golden Angel’s Chef Daddy and purchase it thinking it’s going to be a scorching hot read filled with spoons and spatulas being inserted into all kinds of orifices in a fun and sexy way. Yes, there are some sex scenes here, but the whole thing is kind of ruined by the heroine Vicky’s constant blistering whining.
Chef Saul runs a tight ship where his kitchen is concerned, and he is sleeping with Vicky, one of his underlings. Our heroine is constantly whining that he is not favoring her with praises all the time, giving those that do get praised by him her side eye, and whining that another female chef has a crush on Saul and that woman is doing her best to crush Vicky out of the competition. Worse, Saul believes that Rachel has a crush on him too. Ugh.
Spoiler: Rachel isn’t infatuated with Saul, not one bit, which makes both Saul and Vicky look like colossal twits. I’m not sure what the author’s intention is in doing that, but while I applaud the author for not making her characters picture perfect, a few more pages let the characters get their act together and convince me that they do have some brainpower would have improved the story tremendously.
As it is, Vicky just keeps whining instead of actually bettering herself, as if she’s entitled to being given special treatment in the workplace because she lets the boss stick it to her, thus setting back feminism to the days before mankind started walking on the moon. In the end, she turns out to be awesome at baking instead of, er, chef-ing so all of a sudden she is awesome again, everyone is praising her, and she can now take Saul’s pee-pee up everywhere with a sense of entitlement that is bigger than the size of Saul’s endowment.
I’d have respected the heroine more if she’d demonstrated that she is trying to improve her skills as a chef instead of just whining that she’s not automatically treated like a precious princess, but maybe that’s just me.
As for Saul, he is convinced that a pee-pee in Vicky’s, uh, here and there is the best way to get her to stop whining. Sure, this is tad Neanderthal if we wanted to be politically correct, but it works as a stopgap measure, so it’s not like I can blame him for doing this. Having him stuff a cork into her mouth won’t be as sexy, after all, and the author has a sexy story to sell here to make some bread.
Still, the fact that he is condescending and patronizing to Vicky doesn’t exactly endear him to me, and I’d probably give him double the side eye if I were Vicky’s colleague, because from all appearances, that woman is more of a whiny block of wood in the kitchen rather than a valuable help.
I don’t know. I don’t find Chef Daddy sexy or romantic. If anything, it’s more of a cautionary tale about having affairs in the workplace. If one must sleep with a colleague, at least do it with a brainy one, instead of that whiny crybaby that believes she is entitled to all kinds of privilege and special treatment just because she’s sleeping with someone at the workplace.
