Masterchef Recap: How Did I Get Delivered Here?
They’re in the marina district of San Francisco, the part of the city that the Tanner family visits when they need to sail a boat somewhere. The amateurs head to a restaurant called Atelier Crenn (French for “Crenn’s Atelier”), a two-star Michelin restaurant that is way, way too good for these weirdos to be cooking in, but it looks like someone’s called in some favours here.
George tells them that they have challenge that is “part pressure test, part team challenge”, which the amateurs laugh at for reasons that can never be explained. They split into teams, and Elena assures us that she is excited to be working with Matt the Amateur and Mimi on the red team, and why wouldn’t she be — they are such exciting people. Especially Mimi, who is still there. Trent is not involved though — he sits this one out because last night he won what the voiceover tells us is “the ultimate prize”, but which was actually just an opportunity to possibly be allowed to compete for the chance to enter the final competition for the ultimate prize.
Now it is time to introduce the proprietor of Atelier Crenn, Dominique Crenn, who will be played tonight by Juliette Binoche. Apparently she has been named the world’s best female chef, which is a weird kind of title, isn’t it? It’s not like cooking is separated into gender classes.
Juliette unveils the two dishes that the teams will have to recreate. Both of the dishes seem to be small piles of dirt on a plank. Everyone oohs and aahs over them, but seriously, it looks like someone’s walked into a forest and served whatever they can scrape off the soles of their shoes. Also the dessert is a beetroot sorbet because, in accordance with the Repellent Food Fads Act of 2016, beetroot has to be in absolutely everything at the moment.
Elise is overawed by how much beetroot juice she has to make, in scenes reminiscent of Adrian Mole’s first meeting with Bert Baxter. It’s a beetroot battle as Elise and Mimi both peel beet after beet and fill the processor to the brim with the rich, dark liquid that for all we know is actually blood. A portentous close-up of the knife block implies that we are about to see a murder, but actually we’re just about to see Mimi cut her finger. As always, a Michelin-starred kitchen will rebel against the presence of unworthy cooks in it.
There is no time for Mimi to stop and attempt to prevent massive blood loss, as Elise already has her beetroot juice on heat — the time when beetroot juice is at its most aggressive. She simply moves on, death beckoning ever closer.
Meanwhile Brett is busy making a thing called “mushroom paper”, which is a way of preparing mushrooms that is deeply unsatisfying, but has the compensation of being irritatingly difficult. To think yesterday we were speaking of “respecting the produce, and today we’re making paper out of mushrooms.
Elise hasn’t got time to wait for her beetroot juice to cool down before turning on the blender. As she knows, if you put hot liquid into a blender and turn it on, it explodes, but she’s so pressed for time that she does it anyway. To her surprise, it explodes. There is beetroot juice everywhere, it looks like a Peckinpah movie. Elise reflects on the strange vagaries of fate that cause things to go wrong at the precise moment when you’ve just done something that you know is the wrong thing to do.
Juliette Binoche comes down to tell Elise that she is inadequate and needs help. Elise has trouble denying this, and asks Harry to help. Harry assures he that he will come to help her as soon as he’s put his stupid mushroom paper nonsense in the oven. This is a problem, however, because Harry is taking a really long time to put said paper in the oven, and when he does the acetate melts and everything goes to hell, which if you ask me was a predictable outcome as soon as someone came up with the concept of mushroom paper.
Harry starts work on another sheet of mushroom paper, while Elise tearfully labours alone downstairs, next to Mimi and Elena, who are working together rather smugly. Time drains sadistically away as Harry frantically tries to make this most idiotic of all elements work, but eventually he discovers his conscience, and he arrives to help Elise make her gross beetroot sphere, or as Elise calls it, “spear”. Someone should make a supercut of Elise saying words wrong. It’d fill an hour or so.
George shouts, “ten minutes to go, yeah?” Which I don’t understand. Is he asking their opinion? Their permission? If they say, “Nope, three more hours”, will he back down? If there are ten minutes to go, tell them, don’t ask them. You’re not Bruce McAvaney.
“Remember, you’re in a two Michelin star restaurant, everything has to be perfect!” Gary snarls, but that’s not really true, is it — I mean they’re IN a two Michelin star restaurant, but they’re not cooking for two Michelin star customers who’ve paid two Michelin star prices. They’re cooking for reality show judges who are completely aware that they are amateurs who are nowhere near good enough to make two Michelin star dishes, so it’s totally dishonest of Gary to suggest that the mere fact of them being in this kitchen makes any difference to what “everything has to be”.
Time is up, which in this challenge means there’s fifteen minutes to go, because this is one of those weird meta-challenges that seek to deconstruct the very idea of objective reality. They spend the fifteen minutes piping and smearing and carefully arranging the leaf litter that represents fine dining at Atelier Crenn. Not on plates, though — this is a two Michelin star restaurant, so obviously everything is served on bits of wood.
The dishes are served and the judges taste and are wildly impressed by the fact that both teams managed to place a tiny amount of something vaguely resembling food on their wood. Juliette Binoche graciously declines to delineate all the ways in which the amateurs fucked everything up, which I think shows a nice spirit. She thinks the food captures beautifully the feeling of the forest, that wonderful sensation of being covered in dirt and starving to death and being eaten by a bear.
“This is an incredible effort by both red and blue team,” says George, straining every sinew to convince us that this is true. We can see it in your eyes, George. We know it was awful. Stop lying to us, George — stop lying to YOURSELF.
The judges eat dessert with a palpable air of depression. Matt looks like he wants nothing more than to hurl his beetroot sorbet off a tall building and throw himself after it. The blue team’s sorbet is soft and lacking in moral fibre. The red team is frantically trying to finish their beetroot glaze, and the show spends a frankly excessive amount of time chronicling these efforts.
“That makes me feel happy,” says Gary upon viewing the red team’s sorbet. “This looks like a beetroot,” adds Matt, which makes you wonder what the point was — might as well have just served a beetroot. Juliette Binoche proclaims herself “excited”, which is probably because she knows the day is almost over and soon she will receive her cheque.
They taste — though you really get the sense that this is not the real purpose of the exercise — and are, according to them, mightily impressed. Dominique says if she were blindfolded she would have thought it were made by her own chef, which I think demonstrates that cooking Michelin-starred food is obviously not that difficult and we’ve all been lied to.
The judges deliver their verdicts, and I won’t spend a lot of time describing them because I have frankly lost the will to live, which happened around the time the concept of “mushroom paper” arrived. Anyway the red team wins, which means Elena, Matt the Amateur and Mimi get the opportunity to win the fast track. Mimi declares herself “humbled”, but what she really means is “in possession of a massively inflated ego”, by the day’s events.
Tune in tomorrow to see everyone go to the Napa Valley and, I don’t know, get drunk I suppose.
Error Australis is the funniest book you’ll ever read, and is printed on real paper, not mushrooms. Buy it here.
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