As with all My Kitchen Rules villains, Tyson and Amy‘s instant restaurant could really only have gone one of two ways – the mean and judge-y brother and sister team were either going to crash and burn, providing the viewing public with a deep and satisfying sense of schadenfreude, or they were going to get perfect scores across the board and rock Pete and Manu with a series of intense culinary orgasms. As it turns out, it was the second one, then the show proceeded to rub their victory in all the other teams’ and our stupid faces. Tyson and Amy must be stopped.
#FacesOfMKR
The venerable institution that is MKR may soon be ending its run as Australia’s highest-rated show, but Seven is sure as hell not going down without a fight, and right now, they’re milking the drama for all it’s worth. In the space of one YUGE week, we’ve seen the lowest ever instant restaurant score, thanks to poor Bek and Ash, and the highest, thanks to sexy lumberjack Kyle and his mate (whose name I still don’t remember, I’m so sorry). The two of them managed to wow Pete and Manu with their gamey delights and highly stroke-able beards, and they ended up taking home a score of 100 out of a possible 110.
That record stood for less than a day before Tyson and Amy came in and smashed it with an even higher high score of 102, a new benchmark for the competition. That’s all well and good, but I have no idea where the fuck the show is planning to take it from here. How can MKR possibly get more extreme? Will the next team serve up fluoridated water and sous-vide sunscreen on a bed of crispy Wi-Fi, just to watch Pete Evans have a screaming fit? Will the new elimination twist be that the bottom two teams have to cook each-other? I JUST DON’T KNOW, AND IT’S MAKING ME QUEASY.
#ActivatedAlmonds
Tyson and Amy’s MKR episode starts out like most others, and finds the brother and sister team in the car, ‘spontaneously’ searching for an obscure ingredient at the urging of the producers, and getting hella flustered when the can’t track it down. Today, Tyson is calling around gourmet delis – or maybe it’s just random people, I don’t know – looking for puffed wheat, and getting increasingly agitated at the lack of response. “We’ll just have to stick with the puffed quinoa – it’s just infuriating”, he fumes, setting a new standard for first-world problems in the process.
The puffed wheat thing – grain-gate, I guess we’ll call it – is a bit of a red herring, as it will be the only fuck-up they experience all night. Prep time for their instant restaurant runs smoothly, and everything comes out perfectly, save for a minor incident with their pommes frites, which aren’t quite golden and crispy enough for their liking. Actually, that might be a new standard for first-world problems. I think it’s time to take the deep fryer back from the liberal elites and make frites great again, you guys.
Downstairs at the table, Kyle and Tim – I finally remembered his name – are still riding high on their victory from the night before. Manu actually called their sauce “the dog’s bollocks”, and this is a man who both knows sauce and does not throw phrases like “the dog’s bollocks” around lightly. Bek’s thirst for big unit Kyle and his lustrous beard is still very, very real, and after literally four days of edge-of-your-seat, will-they-or-won’t-they tension, the two of them have a bit of a pash at the table. Everyone applauds and the producers crap their daks as they think about the sudden death cook-off/wedding episode they’ll soon be able to pull off.
Amy and Tyson’s entree is deep-fried lamb’s brains, which sounds gross, but as someone who double-fisted a cake of raw two-minute noodles for dinner and chased it with a bottle of raspberry vodka, I’m not really in a position to judge. You’d think it would be absolutely offal, but the crumbed brains, with a side of sriracha aioli, are apparently delicious. The only people who manage to find fault are David and Betty, who are second from the bottom on the leader board and have become amazingly salty as they stare possible defeat in the face. David says that his entree tastes like a chicken nugget, Manu shoots him a pitying look, then everyone goes back to whatever they were talking about, which was probably ‘mouthfeel’ or something equally yucky.
Main is pig jowls and pommes frites, with two different types of puree, and Amy and Tyson manage to nail this one too. The angry Tyson meltdown that the show has been promising all week doesn’t really eventuate. MKR has been promoting him as the angriest man since Adam Sandler in Anger Management, or possibly the angriest man since Jack Nicholson in Anger Management – I don’t know, I haven’t actually seen Anger Management, so I don’t know which one of them is meant to be the angry one. Point is, Tyson doesn’t actually seem that pissed off – he gets a bit miffed about the pommes frites situation and shouts when he burns himself on some oil, but apart from that, he’s good.
As expected, the judges lose their shit over the main, and dessert looks ever better. While most MKR teams will happily just chuck together a dodgy deconstructed apple crumble or a watery panna cotta, Amy and Tyson somehow find the time to do an intricate, Willy Wonka-like assembly of chocolate ice cream, raspberry coulis, home-made marshmallow, sponge cake, pretzel and meringue. They call it a Chocolate Raspberry Discovery, which sounds like some kind of weird Barry White–Daft Punk mash-up, but I guess they get a pass on that, because apparently it’s the best dessert of the competition so far.
Come time for scores, Tim and Kyle try not to die inside as Amy and Tyson beat their still-very-impressive score of 100 by two points. Then it’s time for the BIG ELIMINATION TWIST, which is that, rather than going home straight away, the lowest-scoring team will stick around for a sudden-death cook-off with the second-lowest. This is a slightly disappointing ‘twist’, because it would imply that there’s not going to be a redemption round this year, and watching the lowest-scoring teams trying to sabotage one-another as Colin Fassnidge coos at them in his Irish accent is usually so much fun. I guess this means that Bek and Ash will be cooking off against David and Betty at some point, so … good for them.
Tomorrow night, we meet the next six teams for their round of instant restaurants, and my body is ready for whatever fresh hell awaits.
