Come Dine With Me?

When the pop-up supper club craze started, eating in a total stranger’s inner city squat, transformed for one night only into a borderline illegal restaurant, felt cool and original. Disillusioned with megalomaniac chefebrities whose chains bred like rabbits (before bunny became terrine in their kitchens), we were quite happy to pay some barking mad, amateur wannabe £30 to sling together a three course meal with entertainment - drag queens, poets, Bollywood dancers, burlesque, Elvis-aoke, et al - in their front room, as at Tony Hornecker's Behind The Pale Blue Door in Hackney (pictured) where I watched a fabulously exotic drag queen called Rozalla flip pancakes like a demented pyromaniac to a Beyoncé track -some compensation for nearly breaking my jaw on the toughest beef ever - never mind Wellington, this was more like chewing Crocs. Then came Come Dine With Me - unmissable TV wherein the hosts’ vegetable towers are inversely proportionate to towering egos and culinary nous that imagines a square desert plate dusted with chocolate powder the sine qua non of fine dining; it was,only circa Fanny Craddock. But when Virgin TV gets in on the act with Restaurant In Our Living Room, you know the trend has jumped the shark.. and shark, as any foodie will tell you, is so last century