This is the moment his hungry fans have been waiting for. Brooklyn Beckham has finally dipped his toes into the restaurant world by launching a selection of gourmet creations on food delivery service Uber Eats.
You might not be surprised to hear that his 12-hour, slow-cooked Wagyu Bolognese tastes like he dipped his toes in that too, but no. Stop! Let’s not judge too quickly.
Self-proclaimed Chef Brooklyn – culinary training nil, professional experience ditto – claims to have created the ultimate takeout menu, a carefully curated selection of five items available through a pop-up service called Uber Hosts Brooklyn Beckham.
The 24-year-old nepo baby, the firstborn son of Brand Beckham’s grand house, says the dishes are inspired by his global upbringing. “I’ve been lucky enough to live in some pretty cool places,” he said. Judging from what was on offer, the coolest spot of all was the ready-meal section in a Tesco fridge.
There’s his own recipe for charcoal-grilled, corn-fed chicken tikka masala, served with rice and naan ($15); the aforementioned Bolognese, which comes with pappardelle and a parmesan garnish (£15); a portion of gyozak noodles of Iberico pork and Atlantic prawns with a sesame soya dip (£10); a ‘buffalo cauliflower’ dish served with Brooklyn’s homemade ‘secret’ hot sauce (£10); and of course his signature dish, the infamous and ridiculous Nanny Peggy’s English Breakfast Sandwich (£10).
The 24-year-old nepo baby, firstborn son of Brand Beckham’s big house, says the dishes are inspired by his global upbringing
His signature dish, the infamous and ridiculous Nanny Peggy’s English Breakfast Sandwich (£10)
The ‘dishes’ were only available via Uber Eats for two evenings this week, Thursday and Friday. They were only available between 5pm and 10pm and even then only in a small catchment area of East London. As pop-ups go, it certainly popped up and went — and of course, Brooklyn didn’t create, prepare, monitor, or serve the food itself. Judging from his Instagram account, he was modeling shoes thousands of miles away.
‘Shut up! What is the point?’ exclaimed daytime TV queen Lorraine Kelly when she learned that Chef Brooklyn didn’t actually cook his own menu. You are joking. “I could do better and I’m the worst cook in the world,” she added, previewing his grisly dishes on her ITV show.
Lorraine doesn’t mince his words, just like Brooklyn doesn’t chop his scallions when he’s not preparing the garnish for the gyozas he didn’t make. He’s a professional, right? So he would cut them into thin slices, if he wasn’t doing something more relaxing, like reading his tattoos and not cooking.
To be fair, the Brooklyn gyozas were fine, even if the wrappers were on the sticky side of gossamer. Paper thin doesn’t mean wallpaper, Brooklyn! But if you got 70 similar dumplings in a Costco pack for £9.99 (which you can), you’d think: hey, not bad at all.
However, I can’t say the same about the buffalo cauliflower dish, which turned out to be six measly cauliflower florets; six vegetable lumps of fat-soaked fat, further brutalized by an aggressive spice blend on their journey from vibrant cruciferous to indeterminate sponge.
His own recipe: charcoal-grilled corn chicken tikka masala served with rice and naan (£15)
The Wagyu bolognese with pappardelle and a parmesan garnish (£15)
A portion of Iberico pork and Atlantic prawn gyozak noodles with a sesame soy dip (£10)
A ‘buffalo cauliflower’ dish served with Brooklyn’s homemade ‘secret’ hot sauce (£10)
Brooklyn’s ‘homemade’ sauce was a tasteless cup of beige goo that tasted like desperation. If you’re considering hitting him with a spatula until he confesses his top-secret recipe, don’t bother.
The chicken tikka was rich and bland, just like Brooklyn itself. The naan was blistered and alarmingly robust, perhaps a bit like old Peggy herself.
If you were to think of this dish as a cheap convenience meal or a takeaway from a mid-sized curry restaurant in a small town that was about to go bankrupt and the cook had run off with the waitress and taken all the peppers and you know -how about him, then you wouldn’t be disappointed.
Meanwhile, the meat mess disguised as bolognaise and squatting on a jumble of (not bad) pasta won’t inspire or excite anyone.
Diners are also unlikely to be impressed by the grandiose menu descriptions, which are reminiscent of the kind of rose-colored details found on a dating app profile. In Brooklyn land, shrimp come from the Atlantic Ocean, the pork is always Iberico, the chickens are corn-fed and barbecued over charcoal (really?), the beef is prized Wagyu and the meat sauce is slow-cooked – but when is it ever cooked quickly?
Everything is designed to give the illusion of luxurious ingredients and specialness, delicious treats created by an amazing culinary genius. And we all know, with the best will in the world, that this is not entirely true. Especially when it comes to Brooklyn’s mythical signature dish, Nanny Peggy’s English Breakfast Sandwich.
Self-proclaimed chef Brooklyn – zero culinary training, ditto professional experience – claims to have devised the ultimate takeaway menu. Pictured with wife Nicola
As the chef explains: ‘My Nanny Peggy taught me how to make her English breakfast sandwich when I was five, and it has been my favorite ever since. That was one of my earliest memories of loving cooking.”
All I can say is that she has a lot to answer for.
The sandwich arrives upside down, wrapped in checkered paper, with baking marks on the sturdy toast. Inside is a congealing three-decker fried egg slathered in tomato sauce, two slices of purple bacon with a thick crust of fat, and a few sausages cut in the middle and placed on top.
This version is terrible, an unappealing breakfast item that Nanny Peggy might even be a little shy about making if she ever dared to try it. It’s not Brooklyn’s fault that a cooked breakfast sandwich doesn’t travel well, but the bacon isn’t even cooked properly and the sausages don’t brag about where they came from, which is a good thing.
I cut into the egg and the yolk is still oozing down the sandwich even about an hour after it was first cooked. Somehow this reminds me of the fingernails that still grow on a corpse. You know what? I think I’ve lost my appetite.
On his online television cooking show, Brooklyn was always talking about this sandwich, almost as if he and the Beckhams were trying to copyright the damn thing all over the world. And I wouldn’t put it past them.
But to see him actually make one was like watching a farmer calve a heifer that gave birth breech. It’s awkward and embarrassing. You have to look away at the messy bits. At one point he even tried to pick up an egg with tongs and I’m talking about Brooklyn, not the farmer.
Yet it never seems to matter or affect his popularity. He is the chef who never cooks, the chef who can’t cook. For Brooklyn, it’s all about image, surface area and hits on Instagram, where he has 16.4 million followers and where there is no end to his culinary attitude and no beginning to his talents.
When it comes to his skills, he seems to have developed a pathological talent for ignoring the mocking torments of others and simply smiles on, his face as plain as a scone, while his slow-cooked thoughts gather drowsily beneath his carefully gelled hair .
Perhaps the most stylish aspect of Uber Hosts Brooklyn Beckham was the stylish packaging. The food arrived in beautiful black boxes, wrapped and stacked in shiny black bags with his name on it.
A nice touch, even though six cauliflower florets for a tenner are difficult to swallow in more ways than one. No wonder Brooklyn Beckham makes a fortune.