TV’s Worrall Thompson in a stew over food safety
WHEN TV chef Antony Worrall Thompson competed in the second series of I’m A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here! he almost brought ITV1’ s hugely popular reality show to a grinding halt by inciting the hungry contestants to rise up and leave camp after they received what they considered to be inadequate food.
He now faces a similar revolt at his restaurant in Oxfordshire after it was handed a new hygiene rating of only two stars out of five. The food safety officers’ verdict has left him boiling over.
‘ It’s not normal,’ Worrall Thompson, 71, declares. ‘We run a really clean kitchen.’
The Greyhound, in Peppard Common, near Henley, is billed as a destination venue for ‘ highquality’ food, where main courses are priced at £20-£27 and starters at £13. However, inspectors who visited last month gave the verdict ‘improvement necessary’ to the ‘cleanliness and condition of facilities and building’.
Former Ready Steady Cook star Worrall Thompson says: ‘Personally, I thought it was really harsh, and we will be calling the inspectors back in a couple of days.
‘We felt it was nothing that would affect the hygiene of the food. We are making the improvements that they suggest and everything has been addressed.’ Worrall Thompson’s career hit a stumbling block in 2012 when he received a police caution for shoplifting items, including wine and cheese, from the Henley-on-Thames branch of Tesco on a total of five occasions.
The author of a few dozen cookbooks, Worrall Thompson said in 2015 that he was writing a book about the shoplifting incident. ‘It’s called Why?’ he said. ‘I hope it will be instructive, not on how to shoplift, but how to deal with it.’
On I’m A Celebrity, Worrall Thompson completed a Bushtucker Trial in which he had to retrieve ten meal stars surrounded by snakes, spiders and creepy- crawlies. Let’s hope retrieving those food hygiene stars is less of a challenge.