Episode two took us to the heart of social media (Central Auckland), where social media gurus Sam and Dan used social media to create a social media themed restaurants for a room of guests who couldn’t care less about social media. In a gleaming montage featuring selfies and eating potato rosti with Shortland Street star Lucy Elliot, it was revealed that the young 20-something year old flatties met on Twitter. See? It’s not all flame wars and cyber-bulling – it’s also a place to foster potential novelty cooking-show partnerships.
After an arduous supermarket trip preaching at-length the benefits of writing a shopping list on a smart phone (they are gurus after all), the pair made it home to dress their restaurant and start cooking. The restaurant itself “#Valencia” (that’s a hashtag for any fogies not up with the play) featured a wall of printed-out instagram snaps and their twitter names in giant lettering. Valencia, by the way, is the name of their favourite Instagram filter. They should have called it Toaster and served entirely a three course meal of toast. Or Inkwell, and served squid-ink risotto all night.
Their menu was pretty simple: tortellini, steak and chips, and brownie with sorbet. What wasn’t so simple was presenting the menu on ipads, which several of the dinner guests struggled to use. Bogan Steph admitted to not even knowing how to turn on her phone. There was no way anyone at the dinner table was ever going to understand the Valencia reference.
The tortellini proved a risky choice considering Ben Bayly runs an Italian restaurant, and was slammed by the judges for being too buttery. The main course featured impressive chips (cooked multiple times over) but, as the contestants noted, they could have served more than four per person. The medium rare steak varied between plates, with newlywed Christie having her metaphorical wedding truly crashed by a massive raw hunk of meat. “Dessert Queen” Sam managed to pull out all the stops with his brownie-sorbet-meringue-yoghurt-pile, which really raked in the ‘likes’. At the end of the night the pair were left with a score of 63. Not quite a retweet- but a fave for sure.
Word of the ep: “selfie” (7 times)
Prop of the ep: the ever-present iPhone/iPad
Amount of Bogan burps: 1
Screengrab of the ep: Gareth seducing non-meat-eater-bogan June into trying the steak
