Monday, 24 March 2014

Celebrity Chefs (from the archive)

Forget stage school and years in rep, if you want to fast-track a TV career buy a bag of spuds and call yourself a celebrity chef.  It doesn’t matter if you don’t know your potato dauphinoise from a potato waffle.  No-one watches Saturday Kitchen for the food; they’re in it for the caricatures: Jamie the swollen-tongued radical Essex boy; Heston the sinister science freak; cute Ching; prim Delia; slutty Nigela; and Ramsey, the git. 

It’s a crowded kitchen but there’s room for more.  How about a bald dwarf pancake chef called Alan; a hyperactive hippie vegetarian of indistinct gender; or Archie the world’s last living Somme veteran who recreates popular dishes with tins of bully beef?  All you need to do is find your character and step onto the gravy train.

Naturally it helps if you open a fashionably quirky restaurant in which you can showcase challenging reinventions of culinary classics.  Mine is called The Fragrant Corpse and offers just two dishes: A Crown of Oysters, which you eat off your dining partner's forehead using a miniature spear; and Beef Sowesta, an entire cow wrapped in fluorescent yellow weatherproof plastic. 

It’s expensive, it’s exclusive, it doesn’t taste nice, but it’s got character. I’m expecting a call from the BBC any moment.

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