10:20am Friday 1st May 2009
MY wife and I were invited last week to join the diners in Hell’s Kitchen, a television programme that I might otherwise not have watched, being more a fan of eating than I am of cooking.
However, in view of the fact that we were about to be whisked off to the distant reaches of East London to sample the fare of Marco Pierre White’s trainee celebrity chefs, I thought it would be polite to familiarise myself with the process.
Firstly I have to concede that my prejudices about the all-round nastiness and brutal autocracy of the chef as a species were dispelled.
Yes, the man with names from three cultures, can adopt that particular persona when necessary to get a service out to the customers, but as the saga unfurled he showed himself to be a man certainly capable of giving credit where it is due and of empathising with the trainees in the very artificial circumstances in which they had to assimilate in days, or even hours, what his usual employees might expect to learn over years of burned fingers and dropped soufflés.
I think with only a couple of exceptions this bunch of celebrities rose to the challenge superbly – and in several cases, surprised even themselves with their level of commitment to preparing mashed potatoes (sorry – ‘pommes purees’) or asparagus.
Other commentators may have things to say about what ‘list’ these famous (or not so famous in their eyes) people may belong to.
It’s easy to mock – and indeed they may have had a variety of reasons for offering themselves up for potential ridicule – career advancement, money, curiosity. Who cares? Must we always snipe when people raise their heads over the parapet?
All of them have a living to earn and we should judge them by how well they did what they did – and not by some yardstick imposed by the ‘knocking’ media.
Anyway, I suppose we were lucky to attend in the second week, when the trainees had improved their culinary skills under the eagle eye of Marco. I had perhaps the best meal that I have ever had (that wasn’t cooked by my wife) in years, possibly since I sampled the fare of his namesake Raymond Blanc (do you have to be ‘White’ to be a chef?) And we derived even greater satisfaction when we learned that our ‘pommes purees’ had been prepared by the great Bruce Grobelaar.
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