How many times have you been cooking in the kitchen and shamelessly wished you had a camera there to catch you every culinary move? Well if you’ve got your hand up in agreement, fear not because you’re not alone. ‘Come Dine With Me’ has been bringing those exact moments into our homes from the UK for years. Now thankfully the most public dinner party on television has finally landed on our fair isle. Expect a lot of wine, singing and just pray nobody whips out the corned beef.
Since Monday night, four of Cork’s bravest dinner party hosts have been inviting the Irish viewers into their homes to witness their hospitality. First up was David, who definitely kept things traditional with his feast and after dinner entertainment. His guests were led outside to feed his horses (that’s not typically Irish at all). Of course vegetarian Louisa was in her element.
Tuesday night was hunting mad Helena’s chance to shine. Not at all happy with the prospect of having a vegetarian in her house, the meat mad woman decided to display all the animals she has killed around her dining room. Isn’t the whole object of this show to make people like you? Even after her blatant disregard for Louisa’s food preferences, Helena got a cool thirty marks from her guests, leaving her in the winning position to bag the €1,000 prize.
Last night, it was veggie Louisa’s turn to get her own back on all the meat lovers. Completely ignoring the fact that she was the only vegetable loving person at the party, Louisa prepared a meal of bland dishes for the five. Vicky and Jamie, who have yet to host their own parties, seemed to enjoy the bruchetta starter. However, as was the case with the English version of the show, there always has to be one person at the table who's a little too inquisitive. Helena’s attitude towards Louisa being a vegetarian was quite shocking. “If you’re a vegetarian then go and eat some leaves” were her exact words on Louisa’s foodie preferences. Helena actually seemed to take offence to the fact that Louisa doesn’t dream about bloody steaks and hunting horns.
During her prep, Louisa had only two rules for the night - no dressing up and no after dinner entertainment. It’s quite baffling as to why she actually said that because the first thing the group did after dinner was part-take in a good old game of questions (no I’ve never played it either). As it turns out, they learned quite a few useless facts about one another and Louisa got to show off the fact that she has sang for Presidents and Prime Ministers (maybe that was the only reason she wanted to play the game in the first place?). Impressively, it was also revealed that Jamie has nine gold medals in gymnastics, perhaps if he just said a word or two, someone may have asked him that before a game dragged it out of him.
Funnily enough, next on Louisa’s agenda was to make her guests dress up in a few outfits that she just happened to have lying around. With Helena done up to the nines as Mrs Clause and Jamie parading around in a gladiator outfit, we can honestly say that this dinner party does not represent the majority of household parties throughout Ireland, I hope.
Finally it was time for dessert, and it’s fair to say they were all fairly on their merry way at that stage (no surprise there). Her cheesecake looked delicious and she sent her guests home with tummies full and a lifetime of embarrassing clips under their belts. After all her hard work, Louisa didn’t manage to get any of them to change their meat eating ways, but she did score a respectful 26.
When I heard that ‘Come Dine With Me’ was making its way to Ireland, I envisaged some wise-cracking cringeworthy commentator taking the place of the UK’s hilarious voiceover man. How brilliant is it that they have brought over the original Come Dine With Me's Dave Lamb to keep us howling with laughter at every cooking faux pas made.
Tonight it’s Jamie’s turn to dish out the wine and hope he’ll get them drunk enough to not even taste a thing.
With this lot, that won’t be too hard.
Sarah Carty
