Some words of advice are easier to act upon than others. If you’re told your dish needs ‘more sauce’, ‘less pickle’ or ‘more booze’, it should be reasonably straightforward. Increasing or decreasing its size is easily doable and, with a little consideration, you should even be able to ‘rethink your presentation’ or ‘finesse it’. However, how on earth do you begin to ‘dial up’ a monkfish if it’s not in your contacts list or ‘show more love’ to a beetroot?
Fortunately, thirty-two chefs were brave enough to try and eight of these adroitly endured such cryptic critiques to make it through to Finals Week.
In the judging chamber, Oliver Peyton and Matthew Fort had a stab at showing enthusiasm for their task, before the daggers inevitably came out. Rachel Khoo began the week cheerfully announcing that she’d fasted for thirty-six hours in preparation, but by the time poor Stuart Collins served his chocolate and hazelnut road dessert, she was petulantly shovelling sauce across her plate and showing utter contempt for thick feuilletine.
It was all a bit brutal. Chefs who exactingly reproduced top-scoring dishes were told they weren’t as good as the first time. Those who completely reinvented less-successful creations were rewarded with lukewarm appreciation for their efforts. They made personal pitches for misunderstood dishes, plied the judges with extra alcohol, even worked a shift at a blast furnace and still it wasn’t enough.
In the end, four chefs secured the four principal courses and a fifth (the highest scoring runner up) got the job of canapés and pre-dessert. Thus, this year’s selection was less concerned with achieving balance and variety across the menu and more about picking the best of the best; a consequence of which left diners facing no less than three successive dishes featuring a soft-set egg.
