‘It just wasn’t your day today’. So said veteran chef Simon Rogan to the first of this week’s chefs to be sent home, and they weren’t alone in feeling fortune’s disfavour. It may sound like a firm of solicitors, but Dropping, Popping and Spillage proved to be a general theme of events in and around the GBM kitchen.
First to fall was returning chef Ruth Hansom from the Princess of Shoreditch, whose menu-delivering drone for her bee-themed starter failed to take flight. She resorted to throwing it across the room to a fellow chef with waiting net. He missed of course.
However, perhaps the biggest clanger dropped this week was by the BBC. Without so much as a spoiler alert, it described two of the dishes facing Friday’s judges at the start of the week – an egg dish honouring a pioneer of IVF and a lifeboat-themed fish dish. On Wednesday, chef patron of Nottingham’s Alchemilla, Alex Bond served up the former and newcomer Tom Spenceley from Kitchen Table in London landed the latter. Victims in the process of elimination thus became painfully obvious. Ruth left after the fish course and though fresh-faced chef Gareth Bartram from Winteringham Fields in North Lincolnshire clung on until Thursday, we already knew his fate.
In the judging chamber, designer Sophie Conran joins regulars Oliver, Rachel and Matthew in time for canapés, which come in the form of Alex’s speared spiced langoustine and Tom’s chicken liver and clementine cracker. The judges admire the ‘technical tour de force’ of the cracker but generally favour the langoustine.