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The baking tent isn’t giving much away this year
Fans greeted Great British Bake Off 2020 with immense relief. In the autumn of 2020, its trailer — sending up the flour shortages that had befallen the country in the early months of the novel coronavirus pandemic — came with a sense of balm, of comfort, of all the coziness the show has long-promised.
By the end, that soothing GBBO industrial complex was decisively punctured. The Great British Bake Off 2020 crowned its deserving winner, but a series punctuated by bizarrely inconsistent judging; a trenchantly awful reminder of its blinkered baking universe; and disquieting persistence with turning Paul Hollywood into a Judge with the hellish gravitas of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian left the show facing some existential questions. Who is this judging for, and what does it mean if it constantly leaves fans bemused? Why can’t the show stop othering and misrepresenting global baking cultures? How can the Hollywood handshake be decisively killed? And was it ever reasonable to expect a show that takes place in reality — coronavirus bubbles and all — to take its fans out of it?
So perhaps it’s fitting that the first teaser for Great British Bake Off 2021 is literally just a short of the tent with some ominous music playing. A show whose fuzzy sameness is — was — its calling card gives nothing away.
Loaf is in the air...
— British Bake Off (@BritishBakeOff) September 2, 2021
The Great British Bake Off. Coming Soon. #GBBO pic.twitter.com/34ERXP54U1
And in other news...
- Here are London’s hottest restaurants, right now.
- How the fight to save Seven Sisters’s Latin Village from redevelopment meant preserving a culinary sanctuary.
- Sessions Arts Club is London’s most spectacular new dining room, so take a good look inside.
- Masterchef: The Professionals finalist Santosh Shah will run a six-week, fifteen-course Nepalese pop-up out of Cinnamon Kitchen City from 20 September. [Big Hospitality]
- Long-struggling burger chain Byron is back under fire over proposed changes to its tipping system, which waiters say will leave them giving up tips to management. [Guardian]
- Good tweet:
Sometimes I go to tweet something mundane, like "hey if you eat walnuts with a banana it's like eating banana bread!" but stop myself because I know the replies will be like "just eat banana bread??" and "why encourage people to do swaps when they're allowed to just have cake :\"
— Sarah Manavis (@sarahmanavis) September 2, 2021