So, cooking doesn’t get tougher than this…
There is something of the Gregg Wallace about this claim, with the former greengrocer having famously shouted this at us on the MasterChef set for more than a decade.
Is it like MasterChef then?
More like MasterChef US, which perhaps isn’t much of a surprise given both are presented by Ramsay. To its credit, Next Level Chef does do everything it can to get your attention. It’s a show that’s clearly been made with sizeable budget: there’s a huge set, an aggressively tense score, and, of course, Ramsay himself, arguably the world’s most high-profile chef, who is also one of the show’s executive producers. All this means that when he says in the opening minutes that Next Level Chef is so intense it would make ‘even the most experienced cooks nervous’, you momentarily believe him.
Who are the presenters?
Alongside Ramasy are two co-judges: Padstow-based restaurateur and former Ramsay protégé Paul Ainsworth, and US chef Nyesha Arrington. Ainsworth is best known for his Michelin-starred restaurant Paul Ainsworth at Number Six but also runs The Mariners pub and Caffe Rojano as well as Padstow Townhouse while Californian chef Arrington made a name for herself thanks to appearances on Food Network's Chef Hunter and Bravo's Top Chef.
What’s the idea then?
Next Level Chef sees a dozen chefs – some with a professional background, others just passionate home cooks – compete in a series of cooking challenges, divided into three teams under the guidance and judgment of Ramsay, Ainsworth, and Arrington. Each week the teams compete in a multi-storey complex with three very different kitchen spaces. The top floor is a sort of penthouse nirvana for chefs with state-of-the-art equipment and every sort of spice and condiment available: the middle level holds a conventional restaurant-worthy kitchen; and the basement is filled with an assortment of damaged and/or soiled kitchen equipment that make preparing even the most basic of dishes a challenge.
So far, so intriguing. How do chefs level up, so to speak?
Each week the contestants have to prepare a dish using ingredients grabbed from an open-sided dumbwaiter that moves between the levels. If they cook the best dish, then their team wins and will be able to cook in the top floor kitchen the following week. The chefs of the two worst dishes compete in a cookoff, with the loser eventually being ejected from the competition and the rest of their team consigned to cooking in the basement with blunt knives and wonky whisks next time round.
Sounds brutal. But is it any good?
The show originally started out life in the US where it was successful enough to score a second series, but the jury is out of whether Ramsay can replicate the show’s success on these shores. The brash US TV style may initially be eye-catching, but it soon grows weary – although there’s probably a fun drinking game to be had based on all the different ways the judges manage to shoehorn the term ‘next level’ into the show.
Yikes! Potentially a bit of a kitchen nightmare then?
You could say that. One of the most bemusing elements of the show is this dumbwaiter that moves between levels, which appears to have been inspired by The Platform – a film set in a dystopic prison complex with vertical cells where inmates were fed from a food platform that moved between the levels.
Hmm, dystopian fiction and cookery competitions aren’t exactly conventional bedfellows…
Not yet they’re not, but given the need to keep things fresh in the overcrowded TV cooking competition format it could become a thing.
Next Level Chef airs on Wednesday nights on ITV.