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To hold us over until Bravo’s Top Chef returns — March 12, in the City of Big Shoulders — armchair chefs and restaurateurs can follow along with BBC’s Last Restaurant Standing. It doesn’t have one-quarter of Top Chef‘s inter-personal dramas and gasp-out-loud challenges, but it has its charms.
Nine couples have each been given a space (in the charming exurbs around Oxford) and a budget to open and operate a restaurant; the theme, design and cuisine is up to them. The contestants have created an assortment of Euro- and American-style ventures, but so far, just two have proved most intriguing. On the good side is the bright, colorful bistro offering food from Ghana (yummy-looking stews); the tarnished side of the coin is the ordinary English mom-and-son who in ordinary England cannot get a restaurant offering ordinary English food to function.
There are the usual tears from stressed contestants, tight-lipped snipes from peeved customers and, for comic relief, the Mutt-and-Jeff team of newlyweds who just don’t get it: She’s an American “actress” with an irritating “bubbly” personality perpetually set on 11; he’s a dour little dude who regularly abandons his kitchen to noodle away on his jazz drums.
The whole custard-burning, wine-sloshing, fork-dropping stress-fest is presided over by well-known chef and restaurateur Raymond Blanc. His French-accented English is just this side of unintelligible, and he’s a dead ringer for whatever character actor gets the role of dyspeptic French chief of police in European thrillers.
The pace of Last Restaurant is glacial compared to its frantic American cousin. One episode is spent presenting a night of custom; last week’s added challenge asked the contestants to add special cocktails and desserts to their menus. After Blanc and his team of testers determine the three lowest-performing restaurants, a special challenge, such as hosting a private party on a fixed budget, is set for the following week’s episode. At this rate, we’ll be cooking well into summer.
But the relaxed pace lets us enjoy the delicious small moments such as when the decidedly proletariat team made up of a prison chef and a bingo-hall worker can’t think up a single cocktail, or when a reputedly top-notch home chef is forced to ask his hired kitchen help how to chop leeks. And when contestants are cut, they’re sent packing in a mini-van. Oh, the disgrace!
This article appears in Feb 21-27, 2008.
You’re right–the pacing on this show is glacial compared to the customary reality-programming and it takes a bit of getting used to, but the small rewards are worth it.
I particularly liked the episode where three of the teams had to invent cheap and fast menus to peddle to scientists working in a huge aerospace research lab; clearly the order of the day for the astrophysicists was to eat and get back to work, and their expressions as they listened to the food offerings (‘tex-mex’ preceded by something called a ‘lime shooter’) were priceless.
And, having lived in the UK, I have to say that the idea of ‘classic British cookery’ brings to mind grey meat, overdone root-vegetables and saccharine desserts–but that’s just me….
Will there be a season two? The pace may have been slow to some. I am a culinary student and learned more about front and back of house from this show. Thanks!
It seems that a second season is being filmed in the U.K. this summer — which might land it stateside sometime next year.