In the streets of London, there is a revolt.
Fire, and fireworks.
People are no longer satisfied to eat medicore, boring British food. They want quality. They want passion.
More flames, and exploding bottles of wine, falling flower petals.
One chef started the uprising, and he is looking for fresh talent to join him in his culinary revolution. Twenty will try, but only one will succeed.
Flambe food that sets the entire table on fire.
Nineteen chefs will be thrown out of the kitchen and want for bread as they cry on the floor...
Closeups of different chefs sobbing, and a boyishly handsome man in his early forties with short dark hair and moss-green eyes, wearing a white chef's outfit, smirking as he drinks a bottle of water labeled CONTESTANT TEARS.
"Let them eat cake," the man says, and the screen cuts away to a decadent strawberry-chocolate cake a dozen graduated tiers tall, being chopped in half by a guillotine, with chocolate icing flying onto the screen in the letters Let Them Eat Cake, becoming fire and blood.
It was 2021, and the seventh season of Let Them Eat Cake. Each series, the winner - the last one standing after nineteen eliminations - was hired to work in the kitchen of one of Anthony Hewlett-Johnson's restaurants, across the UK, France, Canada, Australia and the United States.
Anthony was forty-one this year, and had earned his third Michelin star in 2019. He had become a bit of a celebrity over the last decade, between world-class fusion cuisine and having a blunt, snarky, sarcastic personality on-screen. People had called him the "Simon Cowell of cuisine" - Simon Cowell had once joked that if there was ever a biopic or musical about him, he'd want Anthony Hewlett-Johnson to play him - but Anthony's high standards were why he'd earned three Michelin stars by age forty.
Even more than the appetizers, sides, and main courses, Anthony's restaurants were known for their desserts. Anthony's strictest quality control came in the form of cake, and that was why the show existed. So chefs could prove themselves under pressure, making cakes worthy to be called art. Every winner of Let Them Eat Cake was still employed at one of his locations thus far.
The first episode of a new series was always bittersweet. Everyone looked so hopeful. Anthony was there to crush their hopes. Most of them would recover - they were paid a weekly salary for their time on the show, and being a reality television star for a few weeks or months usually got them a job in some other restaurant somewhere, to draw in the customers with the fame. To even make it this far, there were prerequisites of a certain amount of expertise in cooking. A culinary school was not a prerequisite, though Anthony had himself gone to Cordon Bleu, and most of his contestants had attended a culinary school, but there had been a few odd ones who came straight from a family restaurant...
...or in the case of this one, a certain Sören Sigurðsson of Akureyri, Iceland, who'd spent six years in the kitchen of a Norwegian cruise ship, years four and five as sous chef, year six as its head chef. He had been unemployed for over a year because of the pandemic, but now instead of rejoining the cruise ship he was trying for this. The descendant of Vikings looked like a real one, with longish black curly hair and a short black beard, a perpetually angry look on his face... and pierced ears, full-sleeve tattoos on his arms, like something out of a Viking metal band. He was pretty more than he was handsome, with a sultry, dangerous look to him... and kind, sad brown eyes.
He looks like Jon Snow. I hope he knows more than nothing.
Most of the contestants on the show were either from well-to-do backgrounds or good at faking it, conservative in appearance - "normies" who were used to a comfortable life and had refined tastes. Sören was a bit of rough, not the usual sort of person who ended up on this show, and Anthony thought to himself there's the star of this series as he shook the younger man's hand, followed by he's going to be trouble. He might set the damn kitchen on fire.
That would be good for ratings, at least.
Each episode of Let Them Eat Cake involved making themed cakes to cater a cake party for somewhere between fifty to a hundred volunteers - all free, since sometimes the cakes were disasters and Anthony didn't think it was fair to charge a hundred quid, the usual prixe fixe cost at his restaurants, for something that might not even be edible. Since social distancing protocols were still in place, the volunteer cake-testers were now no more than two dozen. Anthony wanted to do something fun for the kids, who had been cooped up in lockdown for so long, so the first episode of the new season had a deceptively simple theme: fun cakes for kids. Not necessarily as fancy as a wedding theme would be - there was invariably one wedding per season, contest winners who would get their wedding catered by Anthony and his contestants - and not necessarily as fancy as some of the other themes. Kids were less picky than grownups about appearance and had a less discriminating palate. But that still didn't mean the contestants could get away with any old thing.
On most episodes, Anthony only eliminated one chef, but there had been a couple of rare occasions where he'd eliminated two or three at once, for making total disasters or behaving unprofessionally. Cakes were judged by the volunteers in terms of taste and appearance - the cakes were served "blind" with the volunteers not knowing who baked each one, so they couldn't play favorites if they favored a contestant - though the final decision came down to Anthony's own sampling.
Today, on the first episode, he eliminated two chefs. He was downright appalled that they had even made it this far onto the first episode, past the screening process and background checks for culinary experience, but he knew of course that cooking and baking were two very different skill sets and one did not guarantee the other.
The first elimination was a young woman named Clarice, tall and busty with strawberry blonde hair. He didn't like her anyway because she was flirting with him and that was not only unprofessional but she very much was not his type - Anthony was gay - but even if she had been a lesbian and totally professional, her cake was.
Well.
The children at the party actually screamed and cried at the sight of the hideous deformed Elmo with melted red frosting that looked like blood, and bulging eyes that had accidentally acquired dots of red frosting. "WHAT HAPPENED TO ELMO?" "WHAT'S WRONG WITH ELMO?"
During the elimination round, Anthony glared at Clarice for a long moment before pinching the bridge of his nose and wincing in pain. "What do you bloody call this, exactly?" he snapped, waving an arm out at the cake that the kids wouldn't even touch. "Murder-Me-Elmo?" Anthony put on an Elmo voice and said, "Elmo loves to traumatize children! Elmo thinks life is brutal and meaningless anyway so kids better get used to it now! Elmo says enjoy your nightmares, kids! Ha ha ha ha ha!"
Across the room, Sören tried not to laugh. Their eyes met for a second before Anthony looked back at Clarice, who was starting to cry.
"Oh go on then, get out of here," Anthony said, making a shoo gesture.
The second elimination was of an older, middle-aged woman named Fiona who had run a bed-and-breakfast in rural Ireland for decades and had shut it down after her husband died and was looking for a career change that still involved cooking. Anthony felt somewhat worse about having to be blunt with her, but her cake was an embarrassment.
Fiona had attempted to make a gingerbread man, but had also put icing on the head, hands and feet that resembled shit, then went wild with random pieces of candy in an attempt at giving his dress a pattern. The gingerbread man's face was grotesque, with beady eyes, a gummi bear for a nose, and crooked teeth in garish lips.
"The reason why nobody can catch the gingerbread man is because you might catch sodding dysentery if you do," Anthony said, hands on hips. "Look at that. He looks like he's made of shit, then a unicorn took another shit all over him." Anthony waved a hand and turned away. "Bye."
Fiona sobbed on her way out.
The winner for this round - though that didn't necessarily mean he'd survive to the end - was the Jon Snow lookalike, Sören Sigurðsson. Anthony had been a bit dubious about his ability to produce an attractive, high-quality kids-themed cake, but Sören's cake had rated the highest both for appearance and taste. It had been a hit.
The Icelander had made a single-layer rainbow cake, frosted with white icing and layers of rainbow Skittles. On top he had made a unicorn out of meringue, posed with the implication that he had pooped out the Skittles. The unicorn looked like an illustration straight out of a children's book, it was that good, and it tasted as good as it looked.
Each round winner was given a gold star to wear on their apron. After Anthony pinned the star on Sören, he watched Sören's face light up, going from resting bitchface to a smile brighter than the sun. Anthony couldn't help smiling back, pleased at the obvious pride Sören showed in his work. That was a sign of potential - people didn't make it far in this business if they didn't have passion and pride about it.
Unfortunately, people who performed well in beginning rounds tended to flame out by the end. Anthony didn't want to play favorites - he tried not to get attached to any of his contestants, to keep it fair - but he found himself rooting for Sören, just a little.
Just a little.
Anthony lived in a riverfront flat in Kingston-upon-Thames with two cats: Solly, an elderly brown tabby with an owl face, and Seamus, a big grey spotted tabby who was very clingy, fond of climbing on Anthony's shoulder and kneading with his claws.
Despite his passion for cooking, he was frequently worn out on episode filming days - making him glad they only did it once a week; he was an introvert and people exhausted him - so he tried to have leftovers ready to quickly heat up. Tonight it was leftover shrimp scampi. He ate out on the terrace so the cats wouldn't pester him for his food, watching the sunset and the swans on the river.
After dinner he took a long, hot shower. Before he curled up on the couch with a book, he went over to his collection of vinyl records...
...where he still had a few framed photos of his ex, Mark. Mark had been gone almost seven years now, leaving the year Anthony got a show on the BBC, because Mark preferred to keep a low profile and Anthony's fame invited the paparazzi and zealous fans. Anthony understood, but he was still bitter. A part of him still loved Mark, after all this time, and he hadn't been able to bring himself to put the photos away or get rid of them. He picked one up now, the one in the seashell frame, a photo of them together at Brighton when Anthony was still in his twenties. Mark was close to a foot taller than him - Anthony wasn't short, at six-foot-two - and where Anthony was clean-cut and a bit preppy, Mark had black hair to the middle of his back and frequently wore band T-shirts, leather jackets, Doc Martens boots. Mark had a chiseled face like a supermodel, or a painting by one of the old masters, an ancient statue, almost inhumanly beautiful, so Mark looked flawlessly elegant even dressed down. But Anthony had loved his diamond in the rough, finding Mark refreshingly down-to-earth after hobnobbing in the flashy circles of people who could afford to eat his cooking.
With the photos of Mark was a photo of Anthony's late parents, Elaine and Roger. Anthony picked up that photo next, in its plain pewter frame, and hugged it for a moment. He was agnostic, but nonetheless on days like this he hoped his mum was proud of him, if she was anywhere she could be watching. In his younger years Anthony had wanted to pursue a career in law - he had been bullied severely in school and wanted to stick up for the wrongfully accused - but when his parents both died while on a visit to the States in September 2001, having the misfortune to tour the World Trade Center on the eleventh of that month - Anthony had dropped out of Cambridge in grief. As a boy he had been teased about being a "mummy's boy" - he had enjoyed helping his mum in the kitchen and when he brought cakes to school he was shamed for it. He had stopped cooking and baking to "man up", but after his parents' death he returned to the kitchen to keep his mother's memory alive. A hobby turned into an obsession, and eventually, Cordon Bleu. Anthony had met Mark in France, his first love, who had been the wind beneath his wings to build his restaurant empire.
Now he was alone. He was rich, he was famous, and he was lonely. He knew he could go to a club and bring home random guys to fuck, but he was old enough to not want that now, nor the media circus of someone telling all about what he was like in bed, for twenty grand.
Anthony had to be a tough taskmaster in the kitchen, but he had always been warm and soft with Mark. Now Mark was gone and the mask he wore for television seemed to be on permanently.
Anthony grabbed a craft beer from the fridge and flomped down on the couch with a sigh. Seamus trotted over with a chirp and promptly hopped up onto the couch and climbed from Anthony's lap to his shoulder, purring loudly.
"At least you like me," Anthony said, skritching the cat with his free hand. "At least I can be nice to you."
Seamus headbutted him, and then Seamus smiled as he let out a particularly ripe fart. Anthony facepalmed and made noises. "That was almost worse than the Elmo cake, cat."
"Prrp," Seamus replied and headbutted him again, harder.
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