No, this is Patrick.

I lost all Hope today…

Testing, Testing

Much like the last group, in order to earn their spot in an advert for a London restaurant they were having to face an Invention Test. Despite there being a veritable menagerie of meat for everyone to choose from, 3 of the 8 contestants immediately reached for lamb necks like there were an annoyed Homer Simpson

Cliodhna came off best in this this threeway chokehold (hot.) with a dish that John seemed to be hinting was in some way inspired by Lancashire Hotpot despite Cliodhna never saying that (or serving something that even suggested it) but given that she and Abi essentially fill the same spot in the competition they’ve decided Cliodhna’s personality is Being Lancastrian and Abi’s is Being Vaguely Disinterested In The Machinations of Our Reality.

Anyway, Cliodhna’s Not At All A Hotpot came with a great big hunk of goat’s cheese, pesto and a balsamic vinegar and honey reduction

it’s very much a dish that could only be spawned forth from an Invention Test and on paper it sounds like you’ve RNG’d it all together but both John and Gregg were pleasantly surprised.

Chris also had a reasonably good dish with his lamb and by all means he probably shouldn’t have considering he was relying on the power of YouTube alone

I have watched How To videos on taxidermy, by all means do not let me near a pheasant. Chris however did fair much better with cooking his lamb than I ever could trying to make poultry not look like an underdeveloped dinosaur (remember this joke, it pays off later)

Chris was serving his museum-quality specimen with crispy potatoes, cauliflower puree and chimichurri

the only real qualms that anyone had with it was that it was a touch under-seasoned which forced Chris to out himself as the leader of the anti-salt movement

he’ll take you down SAXA, any way he can!

Lambo No. 3 came from Olivia who had taken an aubergine-out approach to her dish, having at some point realised that a plate of babaganoush might not quite be enough to win the judges over and then out of the corner of her eye she spied a pile of plums and like a dog seeing a squirrel she had no choice but to just go for them

despite plums having ruined many an invention test dish (I’ll never forget you Su Pollard) the plums did not end up being the major issue for the judges, instead they took a lot of umbrage with the handful of perfectly innocuous crispy chickpeas she’d thrown on for good measure

it’s like finding out at the most famous guest star isn’t the murderer in an episode of Death In Paradise for once. The plums got top billing and everything!

In an effort to prepare him for an Invention test, Dr. George’s wife had wasted no time in turning their marital home into a series of culinary Saw traps in order to prove himself worthy

on more than one occasion he’s woken up with his leg in a bear trap and the key to his salvation being buried somewhere in a chicken that he had to perfectly spatchcock in under 3 minutes. Having married the Jigsaw Killer did at least somewhat pay off, he had perfectly prepared the chicken he’d chosen as his main-hand weapon

however the actual dish he made was insane. Ingredient-wise it makes perfect sense – chicken, carrots and potatoes: you can’t go wrong! Then he had to plate it up and for reasons only known to himself, he turned a chicken into a sort of hypothetical amoebic stegosaurus

but perhaps you can appreciate the artistry of his hasselbacked baby Digimon and find the most baffling part to be that he hid tiny dots of carrot puree… on a carrot like he was doing a year 8 biology demonstration on the polymorphic camouflage of Peppered Moths

I think I love him. I’ll fight any number of Jigsaw’s Rube Goldberg Kitchen Nightmares to win his hand.

The last of our main courses were both fish dishes. Brin was out to pursue a Mackerel Redemption Arc having only just scraped through the first episode with his original dish

the main critique for it was that despite it looking like a poison dart frog it’s lacked any sort of flavour to grab the diners so this time he was just throwing everything at the plate to produce this Willy Wonka looking chaos

Yes, the little pile of orange segments and raw mackerel on the upper left is an egregiously evil thing however something about that capsized shallot bedecked in beetroot is reminding me too much of sugar mice for me to trust it

I often think about the confectioner who sat bolt upright in the middle of the night with the idea for “What if Sugar but… mouse-shaped?” and somehow created what I will vehemently defend as the best thing to come out of the Victorian period

they all pale in comparison to mouse-sized lumps of pure sugar. At some point this was a discussion of mackerel… They liked Brin’s dish almost as much as I like novelty sugar cubes.

Haddy’s fish of choice was salmon and while most of the other contestants flustered their way around the kitchen trying to work out if arming themselves with a whole celeriac was a wise thing to do, she was a vision of cashmere, pearls and peaceful tranquility

I need to know everything about her. Sadly she shall forevermore remain an enigma (or at least for the next 20 years) as the judges weren’t quite taken with her salmon dish

the fish was overcooked and the mushroom puree was an ill-conceived element but they liked the cooking of her veloute and the fondant potatoes.

Hope and Dinta had both opted for desserts – Dinta going for the fail safe of Generic Chocolate Ganache Tart and for some reason she had failed to see the incredibly obvious critique that she should have served it with a dollop of chantilly cream coming a mile off

instead she’d decided to serve it with a berry coulis that I’m not entirely sure I’m willing to call a coulis on the account it was just a pile of slightly mushed berries sitting in their own berry blood

her caramel garnish was well executed but it was doubtful as to whether the dish as a whole showed enough effort to get her through the round.

Lastly, we have Hope who had the classic Invention Test narrative of coming in with far too concrete an ide of what she wanted to do – in this case a Choux Craquelin

only to then absolutely shitting the bed having been rendered powerless in the absence of her whimsical homemade crockery. Quite why you’d gamble the unknown on choux craquelin, I don’t really know. But then continuing to forge onwards with it after the first batch went wrong is even more confusing

at that point you just cut your losses and make a brownie. Hope however had her choux bun blinders on and went for a second batch…

and at this point you just kneecap another contestant and steal their dish. Hope however has more of a conscious than I do – it would take one slight mishap for me to turn this competition into Squid Game. Instead she tearfully plated up her dessert in a patisserie scene more heartbreaking than watching 3 hours of painstaking sugar sculpting being destroyed in mere seconds on Bake Off: The Professionals

and you’d think that Hope having a weapons-grade Woobie Face going on during the critique would mean that John *might* got about the whole thing with a bit of tact and gentleness

no. He described why her choux was a disaster in painstaking detail and then decided to just make sure she would never recover from this moment by telling her ice cream was grainy

I’m just saying, I’m not going to be surprised if a homemade plate with a ransom note in a whimsical font shows up at the door of the MasterChef studio hangar sometime soon.

An Invention Test Dish Ranking:
1. Cliodhna’s Definitely Not A Hotpot
2. Chris’s Vehemently Anti-salt Agenda
3. Brin’s Mackerel Redemption Arc
4. I Don’t Know If Olivia Deserved To Go Home, Actually
5. Dr. George’s Brief Moment of Madness
6. Haddy’s Salmon Swan Song
7. Dinta’s Generic Tart and Berries
8. I Lost All Hope Today

Hope was an easy choice for elimination considering they had gone out of their way to make sure we knew nothing about the dish had worked

there’s always Pottery Throwdown.

As for the other two eliminations, SOMEHOW, Dr. George managed to scrape through with just Three Things On a Plate Sitting 5 Feet Apart Because They’re Not Gay and instead we lost Haddy

the logic makes sense, she had overcooked her fish but I can still be mad about it. Then it came down to a choice between either letting Olivia or Chris go – a no-brainer really considering Olivia had proved herself to be something of a walking environmental hazard

I am so sad she never got the opportunity to meet Abi. If they’d managed to maximise their joint unseriousness, it may have been enough to put us on to a better timeline.

JOIA de Vivre

For their first taste of a professional kitchen the remaining contestants were off to Battersea to cover the lunchtime service at JOIA, a Portuguese restaurant run by Jose Jara

JOIA isn’t an acronym, it means Jewel in Portuguese, you just have to really shout the name of the restaurant every time you say it. I do like the gimmick of their cocktails all being named after precious stones – it’s delightfully cheesy for a place with a £105 steak on the menu. Understandably none of the contestants were being given the opportunity to sink an entire restaurant through the medium of overcooked steaks. Instead, Dinta was given 4kgs of leeks to prepare to make her Crispy and Roasted Leek Starter

based on how many eggs Dr. George had to prepare for his own starter, I think we can safely deduce that this lunch service was roughly 30 covers. I took one look at the amount of leeks Dinta had by the end of her prep and KNEW that was not going to be enough leeks for a dish that is 95% leek and 5% desperately throwing nuts at the plate to up the markup price

and sure enough, Dinta rapidly depleted her leek supply before the end of service

it was ok though considering all she had to do was throw them in the josper oven (a fancy steakhouse oven that sounds like a G.R.R. Martin character) and forget about them for a bit.

Dr. George was also on starters, in charge of the Bacalhaus a Bras, a potato, egg and saltfish dish that might sound familiar because Ecrin made it for her 2 course menu to resounding befuddlement because nobody knew what it was. Most of George’s preparation for the dish consisted of a lovers-to-enemies relationship with a pile of potatoes

as well as confiting his egg yolks. This didn’t go so well for him as he forgot about the egg yolks thus hard-boiling them and taking the lead in the race to do the worst thing to an innocent egg this series

he struggled a little bit with the plating of his dish – Jose not being too pleased with the roughness of his plating. Much like Dinta, George did seem to start running out of his saltfish and potato mixture but with no time to prepare more, they would just have to accept that his dishes would have to gradually downsize over the course of the service

it’s no surprise that they were running out of food – they were having to work to incredibly precise measurements

you’ll get 2.7cm of pudding AND NOTHING MORE.

Over with the main courses Chris was going for Piggee to Pigger having been put in charge of a suckling pig dish

the difficulty of his main course being that each piece of pork he cooked took 25 minutes to crisp up properly and he was beholden to George staying on time while being encumbered by his tragic lack of ancillary arms

I think Chris ended up coping the best of everyone, handling the pressure and exacting standards of Jose remarkably well. Cliodhna was doing similarly well despite constantly looking like she was the Final Girl in a slasher movie

she has the same constant wet-eyed terror in her eyes as Samara Weaving.

She was also working on the josper oven which claimed her as its blood sacrifice and she had to tap out for 5 minutes to regain the use of her hand at the strictly food washing ONLY sink

I was going to write “which was very kind of Jose to allow” but it’s the least he could’ve done. The second least thing he could’ve done was give her an industrial-sized oven glove for the second half of the service

which has extremely “NOW A WARNING!?” energy to it

it turns out everything in this kitchen is just really big – Dinta could barely see over the counters and Brin seemed to be blending things with a Dyson V8 Cordless Vacuum

I can’t help but feel the size of that blender is just overcompensatory toxic masculinity.

Cliodhna was however still having to ice her hand while doing the sign off at the end of the episode and insisting she had had a great time *burnt thumbs up*

not pictured: Chris standing on the sidelines rolling his eyes and muttering about how he’s lost 40% of his tracheal functionality to fire and he’s not complaining about it!

Lastly we have Brin and his 2.7cm of pudding – a dish whose jeopardy mostly relied upon making producing perfect quenelles sound like he was having to perform open heart surgery

this never proved to be an issue beyond Jose asking him very nicely to make them a little bit neater. It was a very smooth service for Brin and I was more invested in how these two women seemed to be eating the dessert from across the table?

it’s giving Parable of the Long Spoons, which, as far as I’m aware, is an unclaimed gimmick if any aspiring restaurateurs are looking for ideas.