Waiter, there’s an insult in my soup
Reality show serves misogyny, mansplaining and monotony
In case it wasn’t obvious from its title, My Restaurant Rules — the TVNZ cooking show nobody remembers actually ordering — borrows heavily from My Kitchen Rules.
Much like its predecessor, this new series sees five duos touring around the country, sampling a three-course dinner from each other’s kitchens. The key difference, however, is that the five teams competing for a $100,000 prize are the owneroperators of popular neighbourhood restaurants, as opposed to home cooks who consider themselves handy with a meat cleaver.
But if this first week is anything to go by, it doesn’t matter who’s doing the cooking in a high-stakes TV competition. Between their mansplaining, petty blame games and some outrageous comments about how female front-of-house staff behave at certain times each month, these My Restaurant Rules pros still leave viewers with the same bitter aftertaste as the petty squabblers usually found on My Kitchen Rules.
The show started good-naturedly enough in its premiere on Monday night. The teams and the show’s judges, Irish-born MKR star Colin Fassnidge and local restaurateur
legend Judith Tabron, headed to Waiouru for some paddock-to-plate kai cooked up by mother and son team, Denise and Tyson.
The teams also got their first chance to size up their competition. There were Nelson’s local Italians Raf and Susanna, Lyttleton colleagues PJ and Rob, Auckland husband and wife James and Amy, and Katikati high school sweethearts Daniel and Julia.
They all played quite nicely as Tyson and Denise served up some controversial pan-fried gnocchi (the nerve!), followed by an extravagant chocolate garden dessert complete with an earthy rocket puree.
So far, so uneventful, even if Susanna did look like she might faint at the sight of her offensive gnocchi. The warning bells did ring, however, when Daniel first expressed surprise that Susanna was a chef and was then caught on camera telling his wife to shut up. It certainly set the tone for last night’s ill-tempered second dinner party in Katikati.
Chef Daniel’s defeatist energy in the kitchen made for a tense atmosphere that wasn’t helped when he placed the blame for a disastrous dessert solely at the feet of his nonchef partner, Julia.
Things weren’t going much better at the dinner table, either. Free from cooking for the group that evening, Tyson instead channelled his energies into aggressively mansplaining the definition of “shabby chic” to Amy. (No, I don’t know why either.)
But that was nothing compared to Raf’s assertions about female front of house staff.
“I believe that there’s between eight-to-10 days [each month] where women do not want to have to deal with customers,” he told his dumbfounded dinner companions.
I haven’t seen the data to back up Raf’s numbers there, however I do know there’s between 28-to-31 days of any given month where women do not want to have to deal with eyerolling misogyny.
But My Kitchen Rules has always been about outrageous or petty comments at the dinner table, so it stands to reason that My Restaurant Rules would be much the same. Because everything is essentially the same here.
You would think the chances of a kitchen disaster would be much lower with professional chefs in charge, but apparently nobody’s immune to a bad day at the office.
While these chefs should be used to the stress of kitchen service, the pressure of cooking for the cameras and competing for that whopping $100,000 prize money is enough to ruin any dish.
So far, our professional chefs have suffered other problems the amateur contestants before them are often guilty of, namely attempting to do too much with too little time, or presenting over-complicated dishes.
The My Restaurant Rules judging panel feels very similar to previous MKR outings, too. Fassnidge even has the gall to use one of MKR judge Manu Feildel’s most famous catchphrases when asking for more sauce.
There’s simply no new twist on the My Kitchen Rules recipe to be found here. This is, of course, great news for anybody who’s a big fan of watching people make cruel remarks around a dinner table. But, much like that rocket puree on Tyson’s overcomplicated chocolate garden dessert, My Restaurant Rules just feels surplus to requirements.
My Restaurant Rules airs Mondays and Tuesdays at 7.30pm on TVNZ 2