It can’t be an easy decision making the call to return to the Great British Menu kitchen after coming so agonisingly close in the previous year’s competition, but it has paid off for Edinburgh’s Roberta Hall-McCarron. After making it to the finals in 2020, she has gone one step further in 2021 and taken her fish dish all the way to the banquet. ‘I was really nervous about doing it again this year,’ she explains. ‘A chef goes out on the first day, and anything can happen in that kitchen. I’ve been watching each week and fantastic chefs have had some of the worst days of their lives in there. I didn’t get to the banquet last year though and that was my goal, so I was fairly determined to go back and achieve that.’
There are perks to having already experienced the stresses of the Great British Menu kitchen before. It’s clear that Roberta learnt a great deal from the previous year’s competition, particularly when it came to tackling this year’s innovation-focused brief. ‘I approached it completely differently this year,’ she says. ‘Last year, I definitely did it the wrong way around – I picked dishes then tried to match them up with the brief, whereas this year I really looked into the brief side of things first. I actually picked the people or the inventions and then I created my dishes around them.’
Having TV cameras pointing at you while simultaneously peeling potatoes and talking about cooking techniques isn’t the norm for most chefs, but Roberta, who owns and runs the kitchen at The Little Chartroom in Edinburgh, was used to this from the previous year. ‘Obviously being part of the competition was still really nerve-wracking, but because I’d already been filmed once, I was a lot more relaxed – you know what you’re in for.
It’s all paid off for Roberta, however; after high scores from veteran judge Tom Brown in the regionals, she managed to beat some of the toughest competition in Great British Menu’s history to take her fish dish Maxwell’s Colour Wheel to the banquet. The dish pays homage to Scottish scientist James Clerk Maxwell and his achievements in colour photography. ‘He discovered that you could use certain colours with different exposures, to basically go from black and white photography to colour photography. I just really liked that story. He was Edinburgh-born and went to school in Edinburgh, and I'm obviously from Edinburgh, so I was really wanting to showcase that. We use photography so much in the cooking world, particularly now that Instagram is so popular. Without great photos, I don't think chefs would be a success – it’s just an amazing way of showcasing food.’