“How can you say you can’t stand your customers?”. It’s the question launches Blanca Romero, host of ‘Next Level Chef’, Tele5’s new cooking show, which premiered last night, to Melissa Herrera Martos one of the contestants, a 39-year-old from Granada who works in Ibiza as a private chef.
Melissa stands out among the 21 contestants, placed in a group before the start of the first program, for her colorful hair, dyed in hot pink. She is one of the professional contestants in the competition, where three types of aspirants compete on equal terms: chefs, cooking influencers and cooks.
Melissa (who recently went with two other chefs from the island to help in the areas affected by the dana) is one of the first chosen by the program for the video presentations, which follow one after the other throughout the broadcast, depending on how the plot develops.
Her presence in the program is morbid. Melissa is not the first time she participates in a culinary talent show, she already did it years ago, as a aspirant to ‘Top Chef’, where she starred in an intense confrontation in the kitchen with another of the contestants, Rakel Cernicharo, curiously, one of the three judges of the newly released program along with Marcos Morán and Fran Paniego. The plot is served.
“Every day they ask you for different things”
In the video, the Ibiza-based Grenadian explains that although she is now a private chef, for “many years” she worked in restaurant kitchens. “Every day they ask you for different things. Today I want Vietnamese cuisine, tomorrow I want Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Thai…”, justifies the chef’s ironic complaints about her customers in the presentation video.
In this one you can see her on the island, lying in a hammock sunbathing by an infinity pool overlooking the sea in one of the mansions where she cooksa relaxing situation that comes to an abrupt end when a fellow maid at the villa alerts her that guests are arriving and she has to prepare food for them.
“They think I have a supermarket in the house. They ask for anything and it’s complicated”, Melissa Herrera continues explaining in her presentation, in which she confesses that she loves “risk, adventure and speed”. Already on the set, the chef continues to unravel details of her clients’ behavior: “They get up at three in the morning and ask me to make them Mexican food. Yes! Of course! I have a Mexican cantina there…. I love to cook, but they get on my nerves for a while…”, ironizes the chef, who in the first cooking of the night was relatively lucky, since she had to do it in the normal kitchen.
The three kitchens: from the attic to hell
And the fact is that one of the characteristics of the program are the three kitchens in which, depending on a test, it is their turn to prepare a dishthe basement, a filthy kitchen in which the ovens and stoves work regularly and the kitchenware is bad (pans that stick, broken wooden spoons…), which is why some of the judges have baptized it as “hell”; the second floor, where there is a kitchen like anyone can have at home, and the attic, a professional kitchen with all the facilities and technologies.
Another of the most striking aspects of the contest is the platform. The food with which they must prepare their dishes arrives, from above, on a platform. They have 30 seconds to catch them and must use all the ones they catch. That same platform then goes down to the second floor, where only the elements that have not been taken by the contestants from the attic remain, and then to the basement, where it arrives already practically shorn.
In Marcos Morán’s team
After the first test, in which the Grenadian-Bizencan chef convinced the judges, Melissa Herrera was chosen by Marcos Moránone of the judges, for his team. Something that did not please Rakel Cernicharo, who, despite their rivalry in ‘Top Chef’, wanted her on his team.
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