What percentage of the public harbours dreams of being a cooking professional? It must be at 10%, 11%. Every day you are surrounded by them. Perhaps you work with a guy who is too into fermentation. A distant cousin spends every weekend laminating dough. How many people in your household dream of retiring at 50 and opening a gastropub? One? Two? Three? A stark fact: no one in this country doesn’t know someone who secretly harbours dreams of making something complex with hickory smoke for a table of three judges. And so, to try to meet that insatiable demand – Five Star Kitchen: Britain’s Next Great Chef (from Thursday), which is MasterChef but for Channel 4.
Well, it isn’t just MasterChef for Channel 4. It’s MasterChef: The Professionals – every participant in this knock-out hour-long cooking format is already working as a chef, be it private or restaurant owner – with a healthy dose of The Apprentice also (each contestant has to rock up to the show with a neat “restaurant concept” pitch: this isn’t just crab legs, it’s business too!). The prize is a restaurant inside the gilded Langham hotel in central London. The punishment is Michel Roux Jr will be your boss. To succeed you have to get through a series of challenges that mostly involve cooking breakfast to an unfeasibly high standard while someone shouts at you. This is TV that I watch and go: “I feel hungry. I’m going to have to have a snack.” But a broad segment of the population will watch this and go: “I’m going to finally buy that sous vide machine and get good at plating. In three years’ time I could win this.”
I have a side theory that cooking shows are like sports for people who don’t want to have to participate in a lifetime of unbearable heartache just to enjoy them: you pick a horse at the start of the race and back them until they get eliminated because they left too many pin bones in a piece of mackerel, then the whole emotional component is over . Imagine how good the Premier League would be if you didn’t “have to support Arsenal”, for instance. The most likable candidates are Dom (a private chef who specialises in Caribbean cuisine), Raquel (Puerto Rican flavours with a nice line in seafood) and Igor (I would take, if not a bullet, then a fairly solid punch for Igor), and the least likable are … well, technically if I write that down it becomes a bullying investigation. The chefs are the human element here, and the first couple of episodes are all about picking who you like, who you want to see thrive, who you (maybe, one day!) might go to the Langham and eat the food created by.
Photograph: Channel 4
I’m not sure about the judges, though. Michel Roux Jr is very good at what he does (cooking; looking like a skull) but doing his fire-breathing, high-criticism chef drama at every plate of food quickly gets tiresome. To soften him up they have Junior Bake Off’s Ravneet Gill, who is very good and moves her shoulders a lot, and Mike Reid, who talks about food with all the elan of a push notification from my banking app (“My restaurants have generated hundreds of millions of pounds of revenue”; “Is it going to be talked about from Dubai to LA?”). The competition is about cooking, but the focus of the show keeps trying to pull desperately to the hallowed “five-star experience”. Quite often that just turns into saying “high standards” a lot, putting gold leaf on things with tweezers and talking very nakedly about profit.
But, dammit, I do love watching professionals do professional stuff really professionally. It’s my weakness, and it’s probably yours too. It’s strange how gripping it can be to watch a gastropub owner of 15 years mess up triple-cooked chips during a not-even-busy lunch service, and it’s amazing to see what ingenious things people can think to do with a steak dish when given 25 minutes and an extraordinary amount of pressure. “Sieve that bisque,” you murmur, plate of crackers and hummus on your lap, watching as a 29-year-old restaurant owner uses every second of their allotted time to put out two plates of food. ‘You’re never going to cook those abalone in time’, you say, while going for a second bowl of cereal. Would this show be better with Gregg Wallace in it? What wouldn’t. But for now we have a waiting list of people wanting to compete on a competition cooking show, and Five Star Kitchen gives a chance for at least 20 of them a year to do some freaky things with seaweed before they have to go home.
