It’s lunchtime in Mayfair on a late November Tuesday. Through the windows of the restaurant Sexy Fish, I spy a waiter’s flourish as he presents a spread of oysters. Passing Bacchanalia, a gargantuan carved out cheese wheel spins with pasta tableside. A few doors down, beneath a scalloped awning on Bruton Street, sits Lilibet’s – the high-camp, rococo fantasia that Grace Dent recently declared her favourite restaurant in a review. It’s also where the famed British restaurant critic has chosen to meet today, to talk about her latest role as the new host of MasterChef.
The gilded door doesn’t budge. The lion-headed knocker yields nothing. Inside, waiters and workmen dart between marble countertops and powder-pink pleating. Eventually, I try another door that opens straight into the dining room, where Dent is already seated in a Gainsborough fabric-swaddled booth, posture straight, blonde hair swept into a curled up-do, a pot of tea waiting. She stands to hug hello.
“They were very grateful,” she says, gesturing around the diner-less room. “I said, ‘I’m going to come back for lunch!’ They said, ‘That’s lovely Grace, but we’re not open. You can come anyway.’” So, tea it is.
At 52, Dent has reached what feels like cultural inevitability. After almost three decades as one of Britain’s most trusted – funny and stylish – restaurant critics for The Guardian and Evening Standard, she’s now at the helm of the country’s most enduring food programme. This autumn, she stepped up for MasterChef, first fronting Celebrity MasterChef alongside John Torode (next season, with Michelin-starred Giorgio Locatelli), and now set to appear in 2026 hosting the amateur series with legendary Irish chef, restaurateur and author Anna Haugh. They’re riding a significant shift in British food media.
Dent replaces Gregg Wallace, who was dismissed from the programme in July following an independent inquiry that upheld 45 allegations of inappropriate behaviour. Torode’s contract was later not renewed after allegations of racist language were upheld by the production company Banijay. The changing of the guard has been much discussed, but Dent is resolutely forward-facing. “I’m proud of what Anna and I have done,” she says, “and I’d be keen for what we’ve achieved as women to be seen not through the prism of all that.”
Dent has been part of the MasterChef ecosystem since 2011, appearing regularly as a guest critic and once competing on a critics special in 2023. “I wouldn’t have stayed at MasterChef for over a decade if I hadn’t absolutely loved being in the place,” she says. “There’s been so much focus on one person” – a tentative first reference to Wallace – “and I’ve never felt anything other than joy to be there. I mean… God, it wasn’t perfect. There’s an incredibly long report on it. I was determined to stay and make it happen.”
Dent recalls first hearing the news of Wallace’s departure. “From the moment I found out what was happening, my eye was on the job. I had to detach wholly from that circus. I am fully aware of what’s been said and what’s happened, but I’ve really been completely… head down since.”
MasterChef was a show she watched religiously growing up in Carlisle, Cumbria. “One of the hardest parts for me with this whole scenario has been watching something that I just love get a continuous kicking. But there’s people all over the country right now who’ve come home after a long day, feet up with the telly on watching us, playing critic.”
This season’s Celebrity MasterChef has seen a cast of athletes, soap stars, comedians, a Gladiator, a drag queen cycle through the revolving kitchen doors. Dent’s judging style remains incisive but humane – there’s been no Cowellian shift. “I think I’ve long had a pretty good grounding in how to criticise constructively and warmly,” she says. “There’s no personality or taste transplant.” Still, the responsibility feels different now. “When something is wrong, maybe under-seasoned… or a complete disaster, I struggle a little,” she admits. “I feel more power and responsibility.” Tears have flowed freely this season, Dent’s first over a venison dish. “We’re filming for hours and trying the fish pies and cakes that their mother used to make, or hold a special memory. Then you’re making them walk out the door for it!”
Her partnership with Haugh is central to a new energy. “She’s the character and teacher, I’m the critic and the glam,” Dent says. “Anna is in her chef’s whites and I bring the dresses, the hair, the shoes… I do nine-hour days in stilettos.” Where Haugh treats it like her own kitchen brigade, Dent is more maternal. “For years, MasterChef was very male energy. Now, doing it with Anna, feels all the more special.”
Dent aspires to the lineage of British media women for whom style is substance, and views come sharp and flash-in-the-pan funny, like Janet Street-Porter and Paula Yates. Growing up, she absorbed the maximalism of David Bowie, Vivienne Westwood and Leigh Bowery on television and in magazines. “I want people to ask, ‘What’s Grace wearing?’ as well as, ‘What are we cooking this week?’” she laughs.
Her on-screen wardrobe is a considered high-low mix, styled by Peter Bevan. Today, she’s wearing a strong-shouldered Dorothee Schumacher dress. She scrolls through a camera roll of saved outfits: Me+Em, draped Nadine Merabi and velvety The Vampire’s Wife. Colours skew jewel-toned – cobalt, turquoise, chocolate brown – to pop against the MasterChef set (red and orange will clash with the decor). “The show eats dresses,” she says. Hair and make-up artist Kellie Licorish is her right hand woman for glam. They set up shop on the Birmingham industrial estate set, “and vowed to make the whole series as glam and sparkly as possible”, Dent says.
Dent grew up eating mince and potatoes, prepared every conceivable way. She remembers the awe that surrounded the arrival of Asda. “Then we flipped into a world of heavily processed food, which I loved dearly,” she says. “Ice Magic chocolate sauce, Monster Munch, frozen pizza.” Fine dining came much later, after university, when she moved to London and worked across women’s magazines and national papers. Her working class background and the prospects of more kept her focused. “I had no plan B,” she says. “I wasn’t going home to Carlisle to live with my mother because of my uni hangovers.”
Living in north London in her 20s, Dent was intoxicated by food and rooms of power in equal measure: Greek Cypriot restaurants, Edgware Road’s Middle Eastern enclaves. Momo — the late-’90s North African hotspot where Madonna would eat couscous and drink cocktails – was high on her hitlist. She and her friends were ushered out after 45 minutes, an injustice that burned: “I always say that if I was a villain, that was part of my origin story.” She also recalls a Daily Mirror Christmas party at a Marco Pierre White restaurant, seated between Piers Morgan and Salman Rushdie: “I thought… This is pure theatre. I’m never going back to Carlisle.”
Dent’s career has been propelled by persistence. “When you’ve come in as an outsider and elbowed your way in to every opportunity, it’s never going to feel safe,” she says, that soft but long north eastern accent lilting. “This is still an industry of inner circles. I learned not to trust TV producer meetings at the Groucho. I have an inbuilt fear that also articulates itself as a huge, almost destructive drive.”
She stopped drinking in 2021 and now eats mostly plant-based when off-camera and off critic duty, conscious of the toll her profession can take. “When I first started being a restaurant critic, it was like being given the keys to London,” she says. “Expense accounts! Wine and cocktails! It could be every night, and it was for a while. I am, honestly, very painfully disciplined.”
Her days now are tightly managed: six-mile walks, weight-lifting, bags of nuts and white Americanos and careful calibration between pleasure and performance. “It’s a balance of will, work and how I’m going to look on HDTV,” she says.
She sees the impact of Ozempic on dining culture but would never take it herself. “I don’t judge anyone making a choice over their bodies. I just worry about losing a bit of fun and poetry in eating. Maybe it’ll just go out of style, like shopping centre fish pedicures.”
Dent’s biggest pleasure is wandering through Epping Forest and switching off her phone. But she comes back to the joy in MasterChef’s endurance, even as food media has fragmented into TikTok “hidden gem” content and food influencers with the same three adjective descriptors. “People are reaching for connection again, and we’re a sentimental show with a gorgeous story arc that you can’t fit into 45 seconds.”
As finals week crests, Dent will be filming again with Haugh abroad. “I have to get a bikini,” she says – Hunza G maybe. There is little appetite for slowing down. She cites Mary Berry, still working full days at 90. “I’ve got 40 more years to be tired,” she says.
What Dent wants now is simple and ambitious in equal measure, for a show that’s fed Britain for decades. “I want to stay at the helm and restore that joy and trust,” she says, pouring more tea, looking up mid-flow. She realises she has 15 minutes before her hair colour appointment – continuity notes from producers can’t contain her. She gathers her things, aforementioned stilettos clicking on the marble. Grace Dent hasn’t merely inherited MasterChef, she’s brewed, seasoned, added sequins.