CUISINE! The Restaurant, BBC Two, 8.00pm
One of the surprise highlights (and ratings winners) of last year was The Restaurant, and its second series is very welcome by a lot of people on our forums. On paper, it’s The Apprentice meets Hell’s Kitchen but in practice it feels very different to those shows – mainly because the central judge figure, Raymond Blanc, is much more gentle and calm than Sralan or Gordon.
The whole series is somewhat gentler in feel than many of its reality counterparts – partly because it runs over two consecutive nights each week (which I don’t personally like, because I’m never in in the evenings, but at least it means there’s more show to go around). The gentler feel doesn’t mean it’s boring though: in some ways it has the opposite effect because you get to spend some quality time with the contestants and get a real feel for their task.
For the uninitiated, nine pairs (they have some couples in, but also pairings of family and friends) run their own mini-restaurants and are set various challenges along the way, but they mainly have to feed everyone, feed them well and get enough custom to be a sustainable business. One by one the restaurants get closed down until there are two pairs left. The winning pair get to open a restaurant with Blanc. Last year’s winners were the talented but not very popular Jeremy and Jane, who have now left the restaurant they went into with Blanc to do their own thing.
Hopefully this year’s winners will please the audience as much as Raymond. But of course, what will please everyone the most is if Maman Blanc, Raymond’s mother, appears again. She was the undoubted star of last year’s series and really deserves a show of her own. Commisioning editors, are you listening?
