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Gregg Wallace has been replaced — by a middle class woman of a certain age.
Restaurant critic Grace Dent will join John Torode as Celebrity MasterChef's new judge from next month. Wallace stepped down last month after a series of allegations of inappropriate jokes and sexual harassment were made against him.
The former Masterchef presenter has since apologised for his comments, but why should we have to put up with them in the first place?
Dent is a longtime fan of the show who has also appeared on a number of episodes as a guest judge.
“I’ve been watching MasterChef since I was a girl sitting with my dad on the sofa,” she said. “My whole family watches it. It’s all about uncovering and championing talent – and to have ended up in this position, is more than a dream to me.”
She then joked, “I’m so excited that I can’t eat, which is severely detrimental to a restaurant critic. I feel very lucky to be stepping in for the next Celebrity MasterChef. I can’t wait to meet the fresh celebrity faces for 2025.”
Torode, who has presented alongside Wallace since 2005, added, “I have loved working with Grace on MasterChef over the years. She has been an excellent guest, an inspiring critic and also set some incredible challenges.”
Here's what we know about Celebrity MasterChef's newest star.
Here's my honest first impression.
Grace Dent got her start as a restaurant critic
Dent was born in Hampshire and grew up in Cumbria. She went on to study English Literature at the University of Stirling.
“I grew up on beige foods and mince and Findus Crispy Pancakes and butterscotch Angel Delight," she told Fabric Magazine of her early experiences with food. “And supermarkets were a big thing in my childhood, because this was when the really big supermarkets arrived and to me, good food was about having the best brands. To be able to have proper Coca-Cola and Smiths crisps… I still love those types of food today.”
She began her career in journalism with an editorial assistant position at Marie Claire before working as a freelancer writing for the likes of Cosmopolitan, The Guardian and, we are very proud to say, Glamour.
After moving to London, she discovered a new culinary world. “I really fell in love with restaurants. I fell in love with the fact that I had come to a city where hundreds of new restaurants open every single year – and hundreds shut," she said. "It is this ever-moving land of change and plenty and innovation. And that just blew my mind.”
From 2011 to 2017, wrote a restaurant column for the Evening Standard and in 2018, she was named restaurant critic at The Guardian.
“If you look at me and then look at the other restaurant critics, who I love very much, one of us is not like the others! I always say that it is an absolute fluke that I am in, doing what I do,” she said. "The only reason that I am doing it is because it is one of the only things I can do. I have a very small skill-set – I am good at describing restaurants, and I am good at describing tastes and flavours, and I am good at selling the idea of why somewhere is absolutely brilliant, or being able to damn with faint praise to put you off spending £250 there because it is not very good.”
Grace Dent is also a novelist
In addition to her career as a journalist, Dent has also authored a number of books. Her first trilogy, LBD, was published by Puffin Books in the early 2000s. Then came the Diary of a Chav series from 2006 until 2009. In 2009 and 2010, she released two more novels known as the Diary of a Snob series.
She has also written two memoirs, Hungry: A memoir of wanting more in 2020 and Comfort Eating, in 2023.
You can also now apply for season 4!
Comfort Eating
You may also know Grace Dent thanks to her podcast, Comfort Eating, in which she speaks to celebrities about their eating habits.
“In 2020, when we began working on a format for the podcast, the idea was to find a new way to talk to famous folk about their inner lives via what slides down their throats,” she wrote in a piece for the Guardian. “Modern eating, I believe, divides into two distinct categories: the nutritious or name-droppy things that we’re proud to talk about, or to Instagram and generally broadcast, and the more revealing, non-pretty, downright weird things we never discuss in public. And it’s the latter that is Comfort Eating’s bread and butter, pardon the pun – that’s where the truth about people’s egos, vulnerabilities and priorities lies.”
Grace Dent's TV appearances
Dent is no stranger to the MasterChef world. She made her first appearance on the show as a guest judge in 2021.
“From the moment I got involved with it, it changed my life entirely,” she said. “I had been a journalist, and been on TV doing odd bits of presenting on and off through the late ’90s, the early 2000s, I was definitely on things… but the moment I went on MasterChef, it just meant that I could be in Aberystwyth trying to buy something in Boots, and an absolute stranger would walk up to me and ask what I really thought of that soufflé that I ate nine months ago, because they thought that my reaction was too kind."
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She added, "I think that MasterChef is a familiar place of calm for a lot of people in a quite unstable world, and I am just really proud to be part of it. MasterChef is one of the greatest joys in my life. I have watched it since I was a little girl, sitting with my dad on the sofa in Carlisle, where we used to laugh our socks off at restaurant critics coming on and complaining about the standard of their foie gras!”
In 2022, Dent participated in MasterChef: The Professionals.
In 2023, she took part in I'm a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! but dropped out after two episodes for health reasons.
