Yesterday (December 21st 2016), the three-Michelin-starred restaurant Maaemo in Oslo was featured on BBC’s Masterchef: The Professionals in the UK. I know, because I noticed a major spike in my traffic last night coming mainly from this article from my Maaemo visit in February, just before they got the third star. The most popular search terms were: “Irish chef Maaemo Oslo,” “Maaemo sous chef,” and “Irish sous chef Halaigh.” I guess the Brits were very interested in the Irish sous chef at Maaemo, Halaigh Whelan-McManus. If you watched the episode, feel free to leave a comment and tell me more about what happened in the series – especially what Whelan-McManus did to impress the audience that much?
Three Small Teasers From the Show
I don’t have access to BBC Two. However, I did manage to locate some clips from the series on Masterchef UK’s Facebook page. It seems the show is shot on location in Oslo, inside restaurant Maaemo. In one clip, the co-founder and owner, chef Esben Holmboe Bang, is demonstrating how he plates a course of strawberries, cream, and roses from the garden. The second clip shows Esben giving words of praise to a dish of mahogany clams marinated in pickled dill and served with wilted gooseberries, created by one of the contestants named Gary.
Lastly, we get a sense of the systematic chaos and stress of a high-level restaurant, as another contestant, Matt, gets to plate one of the dishes that go out to a table of nine. That means they were actually cooking during service! The course the chefs are plating is the scallops, apples, and celeriac that I enjoyed last winter.
