Only thing is she is neither a celebrity or a chef. I would class her as a kitchen hand looking at the dishes she throws together.
I work in catering and I’ve worked in a few restaurants down through the years. So to my experienced eye she is the moody, overweight, stale smelling one who works behind the salad bar, firing the ready made desserts onto plates along with a bit of squirts cream and icing sugar, and making toasties. Comes flying into the car park in her souped up 1998 Toyota Corolla 10 minutes late on a Sunday morning, the boss doesn’t dare say anything to her as she’s capable of walking out in a huff. She sits in the break room not talking to anyone, just looking really sour. When it gets quiet she disappears out the back with a can of monster and her box of silk cut blue. All her friends appear to be young men, boy racer types that drive cars like hers. She is in all likelihood secretly in love with at least one of them but she hides it and acts like one of the boys, as they would surely reject her because of her weight. She exclusively wears O Neills tracksuit pants and GAA tops or polo shirts. She often gets mad colours like red or blue in her hair and she DEFINETLY has her eyebrow pierced. She lives at home with her parents, probably on a farm.
Sorry for the long paragraph but that, to me, is the essence of ‘Salad Bar’ by Trisha Lewis. They’re a small but omnipresent section of the demographic in rural Cork and Limerick, and I just wanted to acknowledge their existence here this evening. As ye were.