GREAT BRITISH BED-OFF!
It’s not just Paul Hollywood — nearly every middle-aged TV chef has a sizzlingly saucy love life. So which one, asks JAN MOIR, is the biggest tart?
aT FIrST glance, they seem as wholesome as apple pie: the cooking kings of TV, for whom order is everything. Under the hot lights, their plates are stacked, their shelves always neat. No crumb or spillage would dare sully their pristine worktops.
Yet whip off their aprons, turn them loose and what happens? Lock up your daughters. No one is safe from a middle-aged chef in the middle of a monstrous mid-life crisis.
They might look as innocent as choirboys in their white jackets but, behind the scenes, an alarming amount of foodies lead incredibly torrid love lives, forever stampeding off to garnish the latest dish of the day with the hot sauce of their affections.
I know unfaithful celebrities are nothing new. Yet there aren’t many TV chefs — and a disproportionally high number of them are rogues.
Down the years, they seem to have been competing against each other in The Great British Bed- Off, a mattress-busting barn dance of lust, which always ends in an explosive showstopper of divorce, high drama and disaster, with perhaps a bit of bankruptcy thrown in.
Footballers, rappers, princes, rock stars? They’ve got nothing on this lot. One married four times, one had a secret son, one met two(!) wives on Twitter, while another, at 78, ended his marriage by sleeping with his cloakroom girl in the marital bed.
Holy ravioli, why are chefs so saucy? As the winner of this year’s MasterChef was crowned last night by two of our most lusty foodies, we explore this curse of the cooks to find out who is the biggest tart of all . . .
HESTON BLUMENTHAL
eVerYONe says Heston, 51, is a lovely man — and he is. However, he has an inner sex imp that just won’t quit.
After some 20 years of marriage and three children, the Fat Duck chef and inventor of snail porridge left his wife Zanna in 2011 for American cookery writer Suzanne Pirret. The snake-hipped minx stated her favourite things were ‘sex and cooking, in any order you like’ — and like it he clearly did.
Yet, by 2016, Blumenthal had moved on to French estate agent Stephanie Gouveia, around 20 years his junior. They had a baby last year, but the relationship is now said to be in trouble.
Why doesn’t Heston just get a motorbike and grow a ponytail, like most sensible men having a mid-life crisis?
Heston, who has said he regrets not spending more time with his children when they were young, was once generous enough to credit Zanna for his success. ‘She did all the sacrificing in order to support me,’ he said. But he still cheated on her, all the same.
JOHN BURTON-RACE
THree marriages, four children, four stepchildren, two mistresses, one secret son and one bankruptcy — the 60-year-old star of Kitchen Criminals, Britain’s Best Dish, French Leave and I’m A Celebrity does not stint on drama. One gets the feeling that at no point did he ever ask himself: ‘Now, Johnny lad, is this really a good idea?’
After two children, he cheated on his first wife, Marie-Christine, with his second wife, Kim, whom he met at a 1995 Caribbean wedding.
Their family, with her four children from a previous marriage, plus the two they had together, was depicted in the Channel 4 show French Leave in 2002, where the action centred around a restaurant the couple ran in rural France. When they returned to england in 2004, he had an affair and secret son with artist Susan Ward.
Burton-race then left mother-ofsix Kim for Miss Ward, to whom he is now married. Kim burned all his clothes. ‘I’ve never been good with women,’ he said.
PAUL HOLLYWOOD
OH, HOW the king cookie has crumbled. Just a few short years ago, The Great British Bake Off judge was one of the most popular men on television.
Then happily married to wife Alexandra and with a teenage son, Hollywood was much in demand. Simon Cowell wanted him, Strictly Come Dancing wanted him, women wanted him to tell them, perhaps more than once, that their Cherry Bakewells were exemplary.
Yet one mistress, one divorce, one new girlfriend later and the gilt is off his gingerbread. Will even Mary Berry defend him now?
Hollywood, 52, has just returned from a romantic break in Mauritius with his new girlfriend, 22-year-old Summer Monteys-Fullam. That 30-year age gap? Painfully evident in snaps of the couple on a boat — with his gelled porcupine beard and burly frame clad in an orange polo shirt, he looked like Scouse Grandpa celebrating his recent retirement by taking his favourite niece out for an ice cream.
Until recently, buxom, frecklefaced Summer worked as a barmaid in Hollywood’s local pub in Kent. They met last year when he went in to organise his wife’s birthday party — oh, the irony.
Paul and Alex married in 1998, but separated in 2013 when the TV chef admitted to having an affair with Marcela Valladolid, his sexy co-star on the U.S. version of Bake Off. The couple reconciled after he described the incident as ‘the biggest mistake of my life’, but that conclusion might have been a bit premature.
Unable to re-establish trust and perhaps unsettled by an oddly intimate public kiss with Bake Off winner Candice Brown, Alex now wants a divorce.
Hollywood’s relationship with Summer seems to be steaming along like a fruity pudding. She has already praised the man she calls ‘Cake Cake’ for turning her ‘from a girl to a woman’.
I’m hoping that doesn’t mean what I think it means . . . but the terrible thing is, I think it does.
JOHN TORODE
MASTerCHeF’S John Torode, 52, and actress Lisa Faulkner did not, repeat not, have an affair. It was only coincidence that both their marriages ended after they met on Celebrity MasterChef in 2010.
Lisa went on to win the series and Torode’s affections, despite her awkward attempts to carve a chicken and make a poached egg and Hollandaise sauce.
‘I am looking for that extra something special,’ Torode told her on screen — and boy, did he get it.
Torode has two children, aged 22 and 20, from his first marriage, and two with second wife Jessica, aged 11 and 13. ‘One of the greatest things about being a parent is that it keeps you young. You can choose the age that you want to be,’ he has said, sounding very much like the sort of dad who’s never had to sit up all night with crying babies.
TOM AIKENS
TWICe- MArrIeD Tom now lives with banker Justine DobbsHigginson and their two children.
He married Laura Vänninen in 1997, but they split in 2004, a year after opening their Chelsea restaurant, where his signature dish was pig’s head and tongue, steamed trotter, ears and deep-fried brains. The pig’s, not his. Laura was devastated. ‘I thought we would spend the rest of our lives together.’
Tom wed Amber Nuttall in 2007, but three years later, it was off. ‘Am I bitter and twisted?’ he once said. ‘Not at all. I’m happy where I am.’
MARCO PIERRE WHITE
MARCO PIERRE WhITE has married three times and has four children.
his second marriage, to model Lisa Butcher was over in a matter of weeks — he was also furious with her choice of wedding dress.
The Leeds-born chef thought that the cut- out panels at the waist were disrespectful.
In 2000, he married Matilde Conejero. They had two sons, a daughter and perhaps the most tempestuous chef marriage of all. She accused him of an affair and the resulting fight ended up with White spending the night in a cell.
Divorce proceedings started in 2007 and are still ongoing.
Tales of White’s propositions and conquests are legendary, although he briefly settled with actress Emilia Fox.
JEAN-CHRISTOPHE NOVELLI
ThE star of hell’s Kitchen, plus a celebrity version of The X Factor, is a tempestuous Frenchman who calls himself ‘a walking sex manual’ and once threw a plate of mushroom
pancakes at a wall. Named world’s sexiest chef, he tittered in 2014: ‘I leave the Botox to Gordon Ramsay.’
his rap sheet? Two wives, a fiancee, assorted affairs and girlfriends including actress Patsy Kensit and a girl called Joanne who told the Press of their two-day sex marathons.
With his first wife, Tina, he had a daughter, now 32. In 1999, he married Anzelle Visser, a model working at his restaurant. It lasted less than a year. ‘She was terribly destroyed when it ended,’ said the chef. he’s been with Michelle Kennedy since 2005. They have three sons and a wedding date that keeps being put off.
GREGG WALLACE
WhERE to start with the pud-loving star of MasterChef, who has been married four times, divorced three, met two wives on Twitter and has two children from his second marriage who were looked after by his third wife while he was romancing the fourth? Little is known about his first wife, but Wallace, 53, married second wife Denise in 1999. The pair separated in 2004 and he met his third wife, heidi, in 2009 after hooking up on social networking site Twitter. They married a year later, but split after 15 months. he was distraught. ‘I love her,’ he wailed. Back on Twitter in 2013, Anne-Marie asked if he thought rhubarb went with duck. Before she could insist she was only interested in the rhubarb, they were married. John Torode served as the best man. Gregg worries about the 21-year age gap. ‘I didn’t want people to judge her harshly,’ he said.
ALBERT ROUX
Oh, ALBERT! There is no fool like ze old fool. Three years ago, Monsieur Roux, now 82, was divorced by his second wife. She was furious to find he had been having an affair with the cloakroom girl at one of his restaurants and sleeping with her in their bed.
It was the last straw for Cheryl Roux, who believes that the woman was Ukrainian former model Nataliya Lutsyshyna.
Roux — who once wanted to be a priest — married his childhood sweetheart at 17, but they divorced in 2001.
he then met Cheryl, an elegant blonde 27 years his junior.
‘When I met Albert, he had seven girlfriends. I told him I would not be part of his harem,’ she said.
After he jettisoned the others, she relented. Until now.
‘On reflection, I would have made a very bad priest,’ says Roux.
RICK STEIN
ThE chef and author had an affair with a book publicist 20 years his junior that ended his 31-year marriage to wife, Jill.
The pair had three sons and ran his restaurant empire together — a business that includes restaurants, shops, a cookery school and guest bedrooms. ‘Please don’t marry her,’ Jill once pleaded, but Stein did marry Sarah Burns.
Somehow, Rick and Jill have patched up their differences and the business still thrives. how very civilised.