Me after the mildest inconvenience.

Craig Doyle is off the hook, my new completely explicable grudge is with the restaurant Spagnoletti.

Pair Force One

Further evidence in my absolute damnation of this challenge is that clearly they’re running out of dishes that fit the premise of this glorified Generation Game Mini Challenge. This week the two teams were just making plates of things that vaguely went together. Rochenda and Harry’s was slightly more cohesive in that I think you could at least order all of it from the same restaurant

on the other side of the kitchen, The Random MasterChef Generator had thrown a Scotch Egg and an Onion Tarte Tatin at Eshaan and Danielle for absolutely no discernible reason

once again – these two plates of food were not created equally – I’m not sure the difficulty of trying to read WikiHow quality guidelines on how to fold a samosa

quite match up to trying to talk someone through making the perfect scotch egg and a tarte tatin while that someone ponders how to melt butter

although Harry was levelling the playing field by trying to cook his samosa in an oven with the door wide open

and every mother in the country sat bolt upright and asked “Were you born in a cave?”
He did at least have a solution to this, which was to pull what’s called the Ariadne Special in our house by just whacking the temperature up to 220 degrees

I’m just keeping the smoke alarm on its toes.

Despite the hellish rebuke Harry inflicted upon his Samosa, it was his lamb that ended up on the scorched side, which I think John was secretly happy about considering he spent most of the challenge having kittens about how Rochenda and Harry were not cooking the lamb

their plates of food were really good – it helped that Rochenda is one of the more knowledgeable cooks on the show and Harry is made up of three incredibly food motivated labradors in a trenchcoat so will follow any instruction you give him if it means there’s food at the end of it.
The only slight issues with the samosas (which were both significantly better than the show wanted them to be) was the fact Harry hadn’t been generous enough with his filling – which is only very funny because Rochenda had made 12 samosas’ worth of filling

the production crew ate well that evening.

As for Danielle and Eshaan’s plates of food – they also did really well

the fact Danielle’s eggs were hardboiled was never brought up as an issue for some reason – I think they were giving her a lot of leeway given she’d picked up a stick of butter and tried to melt it with her mind powers alone.

Pro No You Don’t!

Nothing catastrophic had happened in the Pairs Challenge so the teams were still the same as they were sent off for the Professional Kitchen Challenge. Eshaan and Danielle going to fine dining restaurant Allegra while Rochenda and Harry went to modern Italian restaurant Spagnoletti who has a very confusing logo

that’s just the universal symbol for WiFi? I’d just think you were an Internet Cafe – granted a very fancy internet cafe because you’d look in the window and see people eating Halibut but it’s a W1 postcode so I wouldn’t really bat an eye at it. The tableware really doesn’t do much to stop the impression that the whole thing started off as a tech venture that went south and pivoted to ~fancy Italian~ and might be a money laundering scheme on the side

also, for some reason their website very prominently displays photos of these featureless Smurf statuettes covered in what I’m generously going to assume is meant to be cheese but doesn’t look like cheese

it would not surprise me if this restaurant had an NFT menu, the entirely irrelevant golden bulldog statue (with anatomically correct gonads) and very much AI generated art gives it away

I have to stop before this becomes an Spagnoletti deep dive – I am morbidly fascinated by this restaurant and need to know who they payed to decorate it because it’s just the worst vibes.

Given the restaurant’s questionable Grindset and influencer bait aesthetic, the food Harry and Rochenda were cooking was actually perfectly normal. Harry was making Pecorino Agnolotti while Rochenda wrestled with the biggest halibut you’ve ever seen

even Harry would have a hard time against that leviathan in the Gauntlet.

Both of them struggled a fair bit, Rochenda ruined a fair amount of halibut but the head chef wasn’t too worried because each fillet had a unique one-time download equivalent on the Blockchain worth at least 5000 Spagnoletti Silly Coins

but her actual prep of the halibut wasn’t bad for someone that was preparing fish from scratch for the first time in her life. Harry on the other hand had wasted a whole batch of his Pecorino filling because his idea of “equal amounts” was to create a variety of hat options for a little gnome wizard like he was the Philip Treacy of cheese

it’s genuinely quite impressive that not a single one is the same as any other.

Harry would continue to struggle in the restaurant with timings and quite often over reducing his brown butter emulsion to the point that it was just melted butter again

part of the problem was his and Rochenda’s lack of communication and Rochenda having to start a few pieces of Halibut over again but by the end of it they got there, but they were going to have to wash the dishes to make up for the amount of cheese and halibut in the bin

meanwhile at Allegra, where nobody looked like they were going to give you a 20 minute lecture on how NFTs are going to change the world, Eshaan was losing a thumb war to a scallop

and learning that scallops have an upside down

but other than trying to figure out the vertical alignment of a bivalve mollusc he seemed to cope pretty well. He took a little too long to cook most of them but at least they were perfectly cooked, and as he said if you’ve come to eat a £18 starter on your lunch break, you’ve got the time to wait for it to be done well

I was a little sceptical of Danielle’s duck dish – it sounded like a lovely main course, but most of it seemed to be pre-service prep with her actual service work being to carve the duck and operate a sort of luxury duck Subway station

granted she made a bit of a mess of the first few ducks she carved, a process that saw her and supervising chef Patrick Powell going through every stage of grief at the same time

the ducks aging to perfection for 10 days only to have themselves meet a grizzly end at the hands of an Eastenders actress is a terrible fate but still not the weirdest thing to happen to a duck in these restaurants….

Oh, sorry. Did I not mention Spagnoletti’s eyeless Daffy Duck statuettes that populate their cocktail bar yet? They’re having the Italian licenses revoked for spelling it as “expresso”. Sabrina Carpenter would never.

And the ducks weren’t the only ones suffering, Danielle would end up walking away from this experience with only a vague understanding of duck anatomy but most of all, an all too real trauma complex about printers

Oh I know. Nothing worse than the university printer getting through 70 pages of your final script before it starts screaming about not having enough ink like it’s Star Trek’s Scotty

you’re going to print off the last 20 pages of this glorified Marie Antoinette fanfiction of pure cringe AND YOU’RE GOING TO LIKE IT.

Your Truck’s Running Out

It seems like burgers have been outlawed in the Food Truck Street Food Bonanza Bonus Round as we once again find ourselves burger free. Instead this time there was a battle of the pies. Harry was making a jerk seasoned Shepherd’s Pie while Rochenda’s pie was more of a damnation of the British economy in pastry

and much like the 2008 recession her pie was served as a lethargic slump

but Rochenda has plot armour so this was actually a clever showcase of true Greater Manchester authenticity

while John very quickly got on with not caring that the pie had less stability than my mental health, he was initially worried about beans as a side dish for a pie (he was eventually sold on it though)

Rochenda looked like she had never encountered anything more absurd in her life

the-woman-was-too-stunned-to-speak.MP4

The Great Pie Showdown was a pretty even match, I was initially worried for Harry going into this round because he’d been a bit scattershot with his cooking abilities and I didn’t know how much a shepherd’s pie counted as Street Food. Although it seems to be that if you serve it in a cardboard container it counts as street food

and the taxonomic clarity of street food isn’t the only vague rule they’re playing fast and loose with. Remember how Edith Bowman got a finger wagging because she didn’t make her own Tacos? Harry very much did not make his own bread rolls and his shepherd’s pie was arguably less demanding than Edith deep-frying chicken and making like 5 different chutneys and salsas

but he covered them in garlic butter and apparently that’s enough for them. Also his flexing is basically the There Is No War in Ba Sing Se meme

all I’m going to say is that Montell Douglas should be able to do the same thing on Strictly and immediately get scored 8s across the board. I still can’t believe her Strictly casting announcement was done via Roblox

I wished on the Monkey’s Paw for Gamer Week for the K.K. Slider catalogue and this is what we got instead. I’ll be more careful, but I’m still hoping for an Argentine Tango to to K.K. Milonga featuring Katya as needlessly sexy Diva the Frog

I’m willing to crowdfund for whatever it takes to have the Strictly singers sing in animalese.

The last of the savoury dishes was from Eshaan who was making two different types of stuffed and fried breads. One being a Paratha stuffed with Mince and Egg and the other being a lentil filled Puri

he got a very weird critique for them, with Gregg asking if they were made using the same bread

and you immediately knew he was being set up for the “this all tastes the same” critique despite the fact the two fillings were decidedly quite different

granted there were actual issues that they could have focused on more than the fact he’d used the same flour which doesn’t seem an issue to me when someone brought in a pack of 6 Tesco baps. His lenti puri was particularly disappointing as it didn’t have enough filling and was so mild it got completely lost amongst his spiced ketchup dip.

Lastly we have Danielle who was trying to be a bit different with her Dessert Kebab made up of grapes and strawberries glazed in sugar alongside brownies – the recipe of which I’m choosing to assume she poached from Chloe Burrows to redeem it

she was also coating marshmallows in chocolate and making pancakes, although it started out as “pancakes”

and ended up as an abominable pancake homunculus the very existence of which could threaten our reality

she was going to cut it out into little kebabable discs so I don’t quite know why she even tried to make little pancakes instead of one big one

she did obviously realise that the whole thing was slightly unambitious and basically the sort of thing you serve at your 8 year old’s birthday party. So in order to overcome this, she’d decided to make it more theatrical by having John and Gregg squirt chocolate sauce over it using syringes that looked far too medical to ever be appetising

the food was perfectly middling small village fete stall run by an 8 year old that doesn’t get to socialise much fare. The thing I’m most curious to know about is who started the Sisterhood of the Travelling Newspaper Print Greaseproof Paper and why Rochenda wasn’t invited

it’s them vs God’s Favourite.

A Street Food Dish Ranking:
1. Harry Finally Did A Good Jerk
2. Rochenda’s Recession Pie
3. JUSTICE FOR ESHAAN.
4. Danielle’s Medical Emergency Kebabs

The decision of who was going to go home came down to being between Danielle’s relatively low effort and Eshaan making some genuine technical mistakes. I knew Eshaan was going to go home because they’d made sure to specifically mention that Danielle’s grapes and strawberries dipped in molten sure were good and no just… fruit dipped in sugar

I’d have saved him purely for the fact he didn’t use a syringe.

And so, we move on to Quarterfinal No. 2!