OpinionThe Circle for food critics, The Apprentice for restaurant PRs – as The Menu debuts, 3 reality-TV food shows the world isn’t ready for … yet
- With cooking, baking and drink-making reality TV shows proliferating, producers rack their brains to come up with something new. We thought we’d help
- How about restaurant PRs vying Apprentice style to pitch an HK$88,888 eight-hands dinner or food critics out-peacocking each other as on The Circle? Maybe not …
Isn’t it odd that, after decades of high-octane cooking competitions, we only very recently welcomed to the digital screen the shaking shenanigans of Drink Masters – a show featuring a gaggle of ornately tattooed mixologists and a host (Tone Bell) who is as smooth as a perfectly made martini?
A dozen years ago, the world became enraptured with the charismatic, bucolic amble of The Great British Bake Off – a show so serene and wholesome it seemed designed to be an antidote to the chest-pounding machismo of series such as Hell’s Kitchen, presented by the pre-eminent shouty chef himself, Gordon Ramsay.
We cannot get enough, it seems.
Over on the silver screen this season, in The Menu, Ralph Fiennes debuts as a furrowed-browed, tormented chef-turned-torturer who runs the world’s most desirable restaurant, located on a remote island apparently accessible only by the 1 per cent (and some obsessed gastro-nerds with deep pockets). Plot twist: let’s just say it’s a Squid Hunger Games.
The Menu, directed by Mark Mylod, is a comedy-horror that shows why we all need to stop taking our food so damn seriously.
At a time when the best part of an hour can be spent waxing lyrical about the sensuality of pizza dough, we dream up some culinary contenders that have not (yet) come to pass.