Imagine: you’re invited to a private dinner party that’s hosted by a Michelin-starred celebrity chef, with a winning and witty conversationalist pouring the drinks. You get to talk about your work, what you’re doing, your fondest food memories and the causes you support while they serve you the likes of roast topside of beef with Yorkshire pudding, carrot tarte Tatin and purple sprouting broccoli, or steak tagliata with asparagus and lentils. They make you laugh over and over. The food is delicious. The only catch is that the whole thing is being recorded and released as Dish, the long running, appetite-whetting podcast from S:E Creative Studio, which is now almost 100 episodes in.
Dish first dished in 2022, when Angela Hartnett and the broadcaster Nick Grimshaw joined each other for their first dinner-party episode at their kitchen studio, a get-to-know-you affair between the hosts. We learn that Gordon Ramsay used to call Hartnett Dizzy Lizzy and that she once made takeaway for Harrison Ford. We also learn that Grimshaw makes a dangerous gin bramble and loves Hula Hoops thanks to Simon Cowell.
Then came the guests: comedians, actors, musicians – everyone from Ramsay to Shania Twain to Marian Keyes – each joining the hosts for dinner and chats that are then edited to 30-40 minutes of glass-tinkling fun.
A word here about the show’s sponsors: Waitrose, the British supermarket, is all over Dish, offering the show’s weekly recipes on its website, ensuring all the wine poured is from its stores, and giving guests bags of Waitrose goodies at the end of each episode. And that’s kind of it: no massive Waitrose effusion is required from the hosts. Everyone gets on with the show and its fresh tilt on the interview format.
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Dish is more than a good idea, though. It’s expertly produced: conversation appears always seamless and sparkling, but that’s testimony to graceful edits and the pleasing use of dinner-party sound effects, such as ice cubes in a glass or garlic sizzling to mark interstices. The guests are all you’d wish for: charming and charmed, with all the right stories. We hear of Aisling Bea and her sister playing “what type of potato am I?” charades, Florence Pugh naming a cocktail after her Granny Pat, Keyes on her family’s competitive storytelling, Twain recalling tasting her first avocado.
That all this takes place while all involved are actually eating a meal on air is near magical, tongues loosening with every cork pop and glug. The hosts are affable, their chemistry infectious and the format tight enough to keep things at a clip but loose enough to allow for the kind of dinner-party digressions that can colour an evening golden. It’s a small wonder so many have been pulling up a chair.
