Quoth the great poet Frederick Durst: “Drama makes the world go around. Does anybody got a problem with that?“
Reality juggernaut about finding Australia’s next great chef – the master chef, if you will – found itself in something of a pickle when one of the contestants selected for this season’s cast turned out to be an actual chef.
MasterChef Australia returned this week for its 2015 iteration, with the early episodes covering the auditions process; judges slowly whittling down the field of hundreds of applicants down into a final Top 24.
But when producers for the show looked into the history of those people selected, they that someone had put a chilli in the candy dish.
NSW bar owner Mario Montecuollo was revealed to have been booted from the competition as last night’s episode began, with the remaining top 23 receiving the news via judge Gary Mehigan‘s best serious voice.
Montecuollo, it turns out, had violated the competition’s stringent terms and conditions, having gained five months experience in a professional kitchen within the past fifteen years. Producers uncovered a Hospitality magazine feature on the bar that he owned – Enmore venue Bar Racuda (we see what he did there) – which listed him as the “head chef.” The fact that his professional background was “bar owner” and could cook his arse off probably should’ve blown the warning sirens in the first place, but we digress.
Rather than head into the main competition a man down, Channel Ten and Shine Australia went back to the pool of auditionees and dragged out the “next in line,” giving South Australian Jesse Spiby a last-minute reprieve and slingshotting her into the Top 24.
The episode continued on in earnest, and featured 25 year-old Victorian Kha Nguyen literally falling into a genius Cucumber Granita, 29 year-old Western Australian Jessica Arnott discovering that “miso and maple” are fetish terms for last year’s winner Brent Owens, and 31 year-old Marcus Cher learning that the next time he thinks of the word “carbonara” he needs to whisper “more like carbo-NAH-ra” to himself ad nauseam.
MasterChef continues as a staple of Ten‘s programming on a nightly basis from now until the world ceases to be.
Photo: Scott Barbour via Getty Images.
via SMH.
