Melbourne author Lisa Joy, a former aide to Andrew McConnell (Cutler & Co) and George Calombaris (The Press Room and TV's MasterChef), depicts antics that may, or may not have, really happened in her chick lit novel, Yes, Chef!

The book's heroine, Becca Stone, is personal assistant  to Damien Malone, London proprietor of eight restaurants and reality TV star, who gropes waitresses,  has a threesome in the loo at a party and orders his all-female front of house staff to wear skimpy dresses.

Malone makes Becca test-cook his book recipes such as slow cooked pigeon with candied pomelo, and asks her to transfer cash into his mistress's bank account without his wife knowing.

Malone's snooty wife, Molly, forces Becca to fetch her a vodka on a plane, to organise her baby shower, and to pick up children's clothes worth $12,000 from Dolce and Gabbana.

Joy, 35, says the book, released on February 25, is a romantic comedy and that the "all-round arsehole" and "demigod" Malone is not based on any real person.

In the book's acknowledgments, Joy thanks McConnell – for whom she was PA for three years, and who owns or co-owns five top Melbourne restaurants including Cumulus Inc and Luxembourg – "for being the very opposite" of Malone.

"Andrew is quite an inspirational man to work for. He's very hard working and doesn't know just about cooking. He's a good businessman and he's got his eye on design, he's quite artistic," Joy told Fairfax Media.

But she says some goings-on in the book might have a factual basis in the wider industry. The threesome in a restaurant toilet was an alleged  "twosome" involving a London chef. As in the book, a young waitress Joy knew wearing a mini skirt was unzipped by "a rather tactile" chef.

Joy says in real life she never got near the glamour that Becca experiences, such as a working on a reality show shoot in Istanbul and a food festival in Florence. The closest was serving table for McConnell at private South Yarra dinner parties for wealthy clients, and selling lobster rolls at his stall at The Big Day rock festival out at the Showgrounds, .

Sydney-born Joy, who with her husband now runs a market garden in the Dandenongs supplying McConnell's restaurants, wanted to be an actor when she landed in London in 2001.

Instead, during the next seven years she worked as a hostess at British entrepreneur Terence Conran's restaurants Bluebird and Coq D'Argent, and PA to a producer of TV drama Midsomer Murders. In Melbourne, she worked in a call centre for Calombaris's restaurants (Becca in the book works in a London call centre) and was an events co-ordinator for his company.

She was also hostess for Calombaris and Philippe Mouchel's defunct restaurant PM24, before joining McConnell as a waitress at Cumulus Inc, then as his PA.

Joy spent four years trying to write a fantasy book for young adults set in ancient Egypt before turning to the restaurant world she knew. She thought of larger-than-life chefs such as Gordon Ramsay and Marco Pierre White and let her imagination loose.

Yes, Chef! took just six months to write and was snapped up by Penguin Books.