M6 is still cooking! From this Monday, the channel is broadcasting a new cooking program daily from 6:40 p.m. In “Chefs à domicile”, Norbert Tarayre, who has hosted several programs on M6 since his appearance on “Top Chef” in 2013, faces in turn former emblematic candidates of the competition, whose thirteenth season is underway.
Imagine a menu from clues
This afternoon and for the rest of the week, it is Merouan Bounekraf, candidate for “Top Chef” three years ago, who will cook opposite Norbert. In this new program adapted from a German program, they must each imagine a meal for guests who have specific expectations: birthday meal, dinner with friends… The difficulty? Chefs only have a few clues to guess what their customers want for the day.
Host Jérôme Anthony, alongside family or friends who are going to taste the menus, sends the chefs photos, messages or even music to give them an overview, in encrypted form, of their tastes. As they begin to prepare their dishes, chefs often have to revise their idea when a new clue turns upside down what they had thought they had guessed, to the point of forcing them to constantly change their recipe. “A cook for me, it must be a chameleon, who knows how to adapt to all situations,” says Merouan. And it is this ability that is put to the test in “Home Chefs”. No waste, however: all the preparations that do not end up on the plate are tasted with pleasure by the technical team, or by Jérôme Anthony, to whom the chefs brought a ”doggy bag” in addition to the menu.
Chefs improvise as delivery men
Additional difficulty: the menus are delivered by the chefs themselves, aboard a van in the colors of the show. It is therefore necessary to provide a meal that remains presentable in its box and does not suffer from travel time. M6 says it wanted to get closer to the new constraints that many restaurateurs have known since the start of the health crisis.
Each day, the two chefs are rated by the guests, to determine the big winner of the duel at the end of the week. After Merouan, Norbert will face Mohamed Cheikh, who won “Top Chef” last year, then Pierre Augé, emblematic candidate of the very first season, and Noëmie Honiat, who had competed in the same season as Norbert.
Norbert under pressure
With this program, Norbert is back behind the stove, as we recently saw him as a juror in “La Meilleur boulangerie de France”. It was both a desire and a source of stress for him: “Recently, I became more of a business manager, so I asked M6 to come back to the kitchen. There, I am served! The first few days, I was super tense,” he says.
On the screen, he is still a joker, but he confides that internally, he had less insurance. He was even afraid of the high level of his opponents. But above all, he accomplished “a dream” that he had nurtured for a long time: to compete against Pierre Augé, a chef who had made an impression from the first season of “Top Chef”.
If there is one point on which the five chefs are unanimous, it is on the intensity of the rhythm imposed on them by this competition: “After a week, I was exhausted! remembers Noëmie. As the days went by, the competition only increased between the adversaries, determined to always do more than the day before.
A program supposed to reflect the reality of kitchens
While the clues can sometimes seem eccentric (to indicate that a guest does not like seafood, Jérôme Anthony asks him to sing: “On the abandoned beach… without shellfish…”), the chefs all say that this is very similar to the conditions in which they work on a daily basis. Pierre finds it valuable to have “a judgment not by chefs but by customers”, while Norbert promises: “You will see what we experience daily in our restaurants”.
“Chefs à domicile”, presented by Jérôme Anthony, from Monday to Friday from April 25 at 6:40 p.m. on M6.