We enjoy watching Dinner Impossible — but it seems that the chef, Robert Irvine, may have, um, cooked up a few things in his biography.
A celebrity British chef who has his own TV show in America faces the sack after he was unmasked as a fraud. Robert Irvine claimed he had helped make the wedding cake for the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana. And in a bid to impress Americans the former royal chef said he was knighted by the Queen – and even boasted that he had been given a castle as a reward for his work in her kitchens.
Irvine, who presents a show called “Dinner: Impossible” on the Food Network channel, has now admitted he cooked up huge parts of his CV. He claimed to have cooked at the White House and received an award for his work from a prestigious US based cooking academy. But following a failed business in St Petersburg, Florida, which left a trail of bad debts he has now been exposed as a liar. Bosses at the Food Network are now considering what action to take against Irvine.
[…] Irvine had also claimed that he had cooked at the White House, but his only involvement was on an overseas visit with the Royal family when he was in the West Wing kitchens. His five star award from the American Academy of Hospitality Sciences was bought over the internet.
Yikes. The show is still a hoot — with time / resource / location challenges thrown at Irvine and his assistants to get a meal for dozens / hundreds / thousands cooked up … but I suspect, if the charges are true, we won’t be seeing him again on the Food Channel any time soon.
Oh, my GOD!!! We love this show… David’s going to be so disappointed to hear this. But I had been sort of wondering how Irvine assembled such an impressive list of accomplishments.
I guess that’s Career: IMPOSSIBLE for Mr. Irvine. Darn it.
The only mitigating factor here is that the Daily Mail tends to be a bit breathless in their prose, so it may not be *quite* as bad as it sounds. Still …
All I can say is SO WHAT? Is he not awesome in the show? Is the show not entertaining? Who cares if his bio is fictional? Resumes are overrated (said the guy who’s holding down a job waaaay over his resume skills).
Of Teefs and Chefs
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Of Teefs and Chefs
So, the actual digging out of the infected tooth with a rusty spoon won’t happen until March 5 (soonest they…
I agree that it doesn’t take away from what he accomplishes on the show (though it does harm the credibility of the show itself). That said, it makes me think less of him, not because he doesn’t have quite so faboo a CV as we thought, but because he lied about it to his employers and to us. And as someone whose schtick is unashakable ethics in terms of following through with commitments, being interested in health standards, and generally living up his word — it makes for a large inconsistency.
I have a mild like of Dinner Impossible…I particularly liked his American colonial dinner…but I have to disagree about the ignoring of consequences for his CV embellishments. Too often our culture overlooks outright lying as a minor personality flaw rather than a reflection of character and as we get more and more used to it, it becomes more and more common…often making the quest to find a lie seem more suspect than the person telling the lie. Robert Irvine’s lies were no tiny tales…all of them were verifiable and I assume used to bulk up his creditials and impress potential employers. I think he should be held fully accountable and publically reprimanded for his behavior.