It's a windy San Francisco day, and Andrea Froncillo is sitting outside one of his restaurants in North Beach, drinking espresso and telling a story about growing up in Napoli. "My grandfather was a feisty old man," he recalls. "I'll never forget what he told me: 'sex is like pizza,' he said, 'when it's good, it's very, very good; but even when it's bad, it's still pretty good!'" Andrea shakes his head and laughs. "And you know what? He was right!"

If chefs are the newest celebrities, Andrea Froncillo is the playboy of the bunch. This charismatic personality behind Sex and the Kitchen has a macho swagger and a devilish smile, and if he can make you blush, he's the happier for it.

Froncillo makes frequent appearances at regional fairs and cooking shows in the San Francisco Bay Area, where people pack the seats and line up for hours afterwards to get his hastily scrawled autograph. He is also a frequent contributor to a number of local and national TV shows on networks  ranging from CBS to NBC. He's a natural in front of the camera, flirting shamelessly while he tosses garlic in the air or assembles a delicate risotto.

But life hasn't always been this good; Froncillo grew up amid the slums of Napoli in a cramped, two-room apartment. He learned to cook from his Nonna, and from those early experiments with simple, basic foods came an appreciation for the sensuality of texture, presentation and fragrance. When he was sixteen, Froncillo enrolled in a prestigious culinary school in Trieste, and was later recruited to work on Italy's most luxurious cruise ship, the Michelangelo. After several years of floating around the globe, he eventually abandoned the cruise ship life to live in San Francisco, CA, where he currently resides.

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To read an excerpt from Sex and the Kitchen: Under the Counter and Over the Top, click here.