The annual parade of expensive food prepared by upcoming and talented young chefs who work in expensive restaurants generally for the pleasuring of the more comfortably-off who deem themselves to be gastronomically sophisticated in their tastes, the BBC's television programme The Great British Menu, is back on our screens and despite my jaundiced opinion of it I can't help feeling quite pleased to be sitting down and watching it. Well it makes a change from the unending saga of Brexit.
There's nothing new about this new season - the same tortured use of a theme for the final banquet - last year it set out to celebrate the 'heroes' of the National Health Service (no-one who worked in the organisation could be spoken of unless the mention of them was preceded by the use of the word 'hero'), such is the BBC's sickly patronising populism with which we have become all too familiar in recent years since the BBC took over from the Church Of England as the main formulator of British public opinion. This year the banquet at the end of the series will commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Abbey Road music studios which will enable the BBC to invite aging former popular music stars to serve as guest judges alongside Oliver Peyton who grows gaunter every year, Andi Oliver who once participated in a reggae band or perhaps a punk band, I can't quite remember which, and dear Old Matthew Fort, described as the Doyen of British food critique who fulfills the role of Grumpy Old Man quite splendidly and who has had delightful cat fights over the years with Oliver Peyton which have lifted the programme far more than any of the gastronomic creations featured on it.
Apparently it's being made in Stratford-upon-Avon and it's therefore rather surprising that the makers of the programme couldn't be bothered to find even one competitor who works in a restaurant in the Midlands and East Anglia for the Central region heats. Still they couldn't be bothered to do that last year either so I suppose it's not such a surprise after all. The Central Region competing chefs are listed below:-
Kray Treadwell is new to the competition and originates from Solihull but works as Head Chef at Michael O'Hare's ever-so-trendy Man Behind The Curtain in ever-so-trendy Leeds. The second competitor is Sabrina Gidda who is executive chef at AllBright, an all-woman club in, inevitably, London. She is given a second chance at winning a place at the Banquet kitchen by virtue of having connections with Wolverhampton. The third competing chef is the now terribly familiar Ryan Simpson-Trotman who is participating for the third time and is no doubt hopeful, like Theresa May and her numerous 'Meaningful votes' that third time, or perhaps fourth time, will be lucky for him. Or perhaps not. Anyway, his Midlands connections are tentative working as he does with his husband at Orwell's in Henley on Thames in Oxfordshire but having been brought up in Nuneaton.
I couldn't resist picturing above a daubière which I came across on the internet and which is really rather a stylish vessel. It's used by the French to stew cheap meat. There's no doubting that even if most of the ingredients used by the French in their cuisine are rather disgusting and the results grossly overestimated they do have a chicness to the preparation of the stuff. Even when they're rioting which ofcourse they're doing rather a lot of at the moment they manage to do it in chic gilets jaunes which gives me the idea for what I might wear when I go to dine in a French restaurant next time.
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