Back in the mists of 2011, Grace Dent received an email from Andy Barker, then the editor of ES Magazine. She had recently written a funny piece defending the classic London greasy spoon from the onslaught of hipster cafés. Barker needed someone to cover the restaurant column following an abrupt departure. “She had such a singular voice and hilarious turn of phrase,” he recalls. Would she mind stepping in for a couple of weeks?
Dent did not mind. In fact, sashaying in and out of restaurants, dispensing critiques from on high like a glam northern Michael Winner, was precisely the sort of notoriety she had always dreamed of. “I was like, I am never giving the job up,” Dent says. “My entire career has been people saying: ‘Could you possibly step in for a little bit while we work out somebody posh who is more suitable for this job?’ Then they’re like: ‘Shit! She’s really good and she’s built an audience!’” She pauses and laughs some more. “Oh my God! It still happens now!”
The difference is, it happens in slightly more elevated surroundings than, say, Roofnic on Oxford Street, site of one early review (“I would rather fall off this roof to my death than go here again”). I am speaking to Dent not long after the conclusion of her first full series as a co-presenter of the revamped MasterChef alongside Irish chef Anna Haugh. The BBC’s flagship cookery show was in dire need of a reset following the sundry disgraces of the Torode-Wallace regime. Gregg Wallace and John Torode were both fired in July last year: Wallace following allegations of inappropriate conduct, and Torode over alleged racist language.
Dent and Haugh have not only banished memories of those two tedious men, but also vastly improved the show in all departments — not least the wardrobe department, with Dent generally opting to channel Fanny Cradock by way of Studio 54 (or maybe Area 51). “I want to bring joy to television,” is her philosophy. “Life is too bloody serious.”
Still, I was concerned that Our Grace might be getting a little too grand following her bump in status from admired restaurant critic to national celebrity who people now recognise when she’s jogging through Epping Forest. I can’t help noticing that her Instagram account now refers to “Grace Dent” in the third person. We were initially booked in for lunch at Café Clement, which Dent was reviewing for the Guardian — only she cancelled at the last minute, so here we are on Microsoft Teams instead. As she logs on, a warning pops up on her screen. “‘They may not be seeing you as you see yourself’,” she reads. “That’s quite a philosophical message,” she says. “I don’t know quite what to do with it!”
”People assume I want all the restaurants I review to close”
Actually, she proves funny, likeable and razor-sharp — that singular voice intact. “I basically look like a claymation witch, so people assume I want all the restaurants I review to close,” she says of her reputation for meanness. In reality, she says, she wants nothing more than everyone to succeed — and it is the genuine warmth and interest in people that she and Haugh have brought to MasterChef that has been the real difference.
“I’d done a few series [as guest critic] by the time I came in to do this one — and I had a very clear vision of what I wanted to do,” she says. “It was for it to be glam, funny, warm and camp. I really wanted to drill down on the contestant, so we really learned who they were. Everyone got supported but everyone got criticised.”
If she now occasionally refers to herself in the third person — well, it’s simply because she finds it funny. She hoots when I ask if she now has someone doing her social media for her. No, like everything else, posts such as “Five more revolting restaurants I will never eat in” (accompanied by carousels of outfits) are something she puts a lot of thought and work into getting just right.
In a sense, she feels her career has been leading to this point. “There’s still lots of people saying: ‘Who is Grace Dent? Where has she come from?’ But I feel like I’ve been working hard for 25 years to have this kind of success.” The daughter of a dinner lady and an engineer, Dent was raised in a close-knit working-class family in Carlisle — apparently on a diet of Bird’s Eye potato waffles, Morrissey lyrics, punk TV and windswept caravan holidays. She remains fascinated by the idea of comfort food as a portal into the past: the tastes that survive long after childhood bedrooms have disappeared and parents have gone.
“Now I’m this Billy Big Bollocks I can rock up to all the fancy patisseries. But I hanker after rocky road”
In fact, when I ask about the best thing she’s eaten recently, she cites a rocky road from a church fete. (Dent leads a relatively quiet life out in rural Essex with her long-term partner Charlie when she’s not filming; I’m pleased she still finds time to attend church fetes). “This is clearly a recipe that has been passed down through six Brown Owls,” she says. “It was written on the back of a gas bill from 1981. It’s Stork margarine, glacé cherries, Golden Syrup and some old Corn Flakes — but together, it’s so British, it’s so perfect. Now I’m this Billy Big Bollocks I can rock up to all the fancy patisseries. But really I’m always hankering after that rocky road.”
Her first job when she arrived in London from Cumbria in the 1990s was at Marie Claire. “I was absolutely the lowest of the low there. I cannot watch Ugly Betty because to me it was a documentary.” She wrote young adult novels and worked her way into the Guardian Guide, where she wrote about soaps before taking over the main TV column from Charlie Brooker.
From here, she segued into restaurant reviewing, first at the Standard and then back at the Guardian — and meanwhile developed a broadcasting career. She has presented the delightful real-life documentary series The Untold on Radio 4, has been a guest critic on MasterChef for many years and even did a stint on I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here in 2023 before leaving on medical grounds. “I’m really glad I did it because I never have to do it ever again. It’s like national service.”
So when MasterChef proper came up — she initially co-hosted Celebrity MasterChef opposite Torode; a new series, with Giorgio Locatelli, starts next week — she was ready for it. “It was a joy,” she says of the final, won by 30-year-old London tech manager Jhané Gibson with a piri-piri poussin. “It was one of the greatest things I’ve ever been involved in. I was amazed that people got it. People stopped me and said the end made them cry.”
What was she worried that people wouldn’t get? “It was a massive shake-up. We were coming out of this period where we had two very… specific personalities running this show. Now we not only have two different people, but two women with totally different personalities,” she says. “You never know how it’s going to go until it hits iPlayer. Suddenly, you get all these direct messages on Instagram — the ones you don’t really want to look at. But that’s when you hear from Sarah in Huddersfield who’s bingeing the episodes with a cup of tea once her kids are at school.”
It was, inevitably, Dent’s vampish, fabulous, ludicrous, outfits that caught the eye — she (and her stylist, Peter Bevan) put a lot of thought into them, though viewers may not perhaps appreciate the challenge of standing in one of these things across a 14-hour shoot. “I’ll be walking around this studio in an industrial estate in Digbeth in a split-to-the-waist diamante ball gown. By day two I feel like I’m on the Titanic. I’m walking around, totally tattered. But I love it. I love it. I want to bring joy to television!”
In this, she is really emulating the TV heroines of her youth. “You know, when I was a little girl, television meant so much to me — and the women on TV meant so much,” she says. “There were people like Marti Caine, female comedian, northern, she came on, did a bit of singing, did some impressions and her outfits were fantastic. I’ve always wanted that role where people come in, get their dinners, put it on their knee on top of a newspaper, and go, ‘What the hell is she wearing? What’s she doing? Jesus Christ!’”
“I naturally want to subvert everything — and I think the British Gen X audience really appreciate that”
Dent is, in fact, a walking encyclopedia of British pop culture, 1973-present, and can rhapsodise for a long time about the anarchic TV she grew up watching, when figures like Janet Street-Porter and Paula Yates were trusted to do pretty much whatever they felt like. “We have lost a lot of risk in TV,” she says. “We don’t just allow commissioners to get on with what they want to do. I’m Gen X. I naturally want to subvert everything — and I think the British Gen X audience really appreciate that.”
There’s a limit to how much subversion you can get away with on MasterChef. But she hopes a passing “Frankie Howerd impression, or a slight breast move to the left” might convey the message. “Life is too bloody serious. If you can’t have a laugh and enjoyment from watching it, we are toast.”
One thing I think most of us can agree is too bloody serious is food. She has little time for the hyper-masculine competitive instincts of Michelin-chasing chefs — “it’s really all about saving face” — and finds it peculiar how food seems to have supplanted music as a source of identity. “You know, when I first got to London, I remember trying like hell to get into places like Momo because Kate Moss was in there. But it definitely wasn’t part of youth culture. There wasn’t this idea of: ‘Let’s get together and queue outside a bakery on Saturday morning for 47 minutes to get the cream cake.’”
Can a tuile change your life in the way that, say, The Smiths can change your life? “If you’re singling out tuiles, Richard, well no. My heart sinks when they make tuiles. Anna loves a tuile. For me, they don’t taste of anything. They just taste of technique.”
Then again, she is a woman whose idea of a good time in a kitchen is placing a Bird’s Eye potato waffle in a toaster. “I was giving myself a talk about this this morning. I was going, ‘Stop telling people you like cheap vegan sausages in the air fryer!’ And then I thought, no. If you want to read me talking about the finer things in life, you can. But I happen to think me talking about eating tinned spaghetti on caravan holidays is as important as somebody coming on and talking about their experience of fresh oysters in Nice, you know?”
Well, frankly, there aren’t many northern working-class women in the food world. Speaking of which: does she feel represented by our new northern Prime Minister? “I never talk about politics, ever,” she says. “I just don’t think anybody gets up in the morning and thinks, ‘I wonder what the woman on MasterChef thinks about the price of oil.’ But from the moment I saw Andy Burnham, I just thought, oh my God, he looks like someone that would have been in my class at school. Every single northern person, whatever they think of his policies, knows someone like him. I wish him well because that is a bumpy old road. And I really hope that whatever happens in the next four years doesn’t knock that demeanour out of him.”
“I could hear [Nigel Farage] snoring every night”
She is also, it should be noted, more intimately acquainted than most with another potential PM, Nigel Farage, who appeared on I’m a Celebrity at the same time as she did. “I could hear him snoring every night!” Farage was apparently fastidious about cleanliness and once gave her a serious bollocking for leaving a rubbish bag out and attracting rats. “If you went to do the washing up and there were 10 teaspoons and you came back with nine, Nigel was on it. He wanted to know where that teaspoon was. He really wanted there to be a system — and you kind of appreciated it.”
As for where she heads next — well, I can think of a few more doomed BBC franchises in need of a reset. But she insists, there is no plan. “The only plan is to make people laugh. And to remind them that food doesn’t have to be that serious.”
