Matt Preston: ‘I asked myself – what have I done?’
For the first time, Matt Preston talks about the anxiety of leaving behind MasterChef, how he feels about the show now he is no longer on it and why his new project Plate of Origin lured him away.
Stellar
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He is not somebody known for doing things by halves, so when Matt Preston rings in his birthday each year, he goes big.
The drinks flow freely, the dinner is expansive and the friends helping him celebrate are in abundance. This year, things were different.
With Victoria in the grips of a second COVID-19 wave and Melbourne back in lockdown, Preston was forced to stay home on the day he turned 59, which he spent taking a call from Stellar and ultimately ordering a humble takeaway pizza.
“It’s my favourite food,” he says, his voice booming with that unmissable British twang. “For my money, pizza is hard to beat.”
Which is not to say that Preston hasn’t spent a fair bit of time at the stove in the past several months.
Indeed, the former restaurant critic turned cookbook author, TV host and weekly columnist for this very magazine also stayed busy whipping up and sharing new recipes on his Instagram page, where his 400,000 followers were treated to the “Lockdown Kitchen” video series.
There was, of course, the obligatory banana-bread recipe. He has since vowed never to share that dish again on social media, blaming oversaturation – but that bit of fatigue aside, Preston says he has been genuinely surprised by the voracious appetite his fans showed in response to his quarantine project.
“There was the debate at the beginning of the year whether Australia was over food,” he explains. “But everything we’ve seen in the past six months has shown how food is crucial to who we are as Australians.”
Which is a pretty good place for Preston to be as he embarks on his most consequential new project in more than a decade.
For years, Preston – along with friends and fellow TV hosts Gary Mehigan and George Calombaris – had been the poster child for Network 10’s MasterChef, the cooking-competition series that made them household names and that permanently upended the Australian free-to-air TV landscape when it debuted and became a runaway hit in 2009.
The show changed the course of Preston’s career and his life, making him and his signature cravats instantly recognisable, not just here but around the world. Not only was the Australian series syndicated globally, but Preston also appeared on versions in Italy, Holland, India, Poland and New Zealand.
“I can’t believe it,” he says. “We were told it was a little show that would probably be a fizzer. When you’ve been on a show for 11 years, that’s how most people identify you.
“You’re not identified by the five or six years you spend at food festivals or your writing. You’re identified by TV. We had no idea what we were getting into and it certainly took off in this crazy way.”
Still, he is loath to give himself too much credit for its success. “Let’s be clear,” he says. “It took off because the contestants were great. Because you fall in love with [someone like] Julie Goodwin or Poh Ling Yeow.”
But last year, when he and his co-hosts announced they would not return to the show they helped put on the map, it made front-page news. At the time, Preston explained that contrary to rumours, the reason contract negotiations had stalled did not involve disagreements over money – rather, he said, they were unable to agree on terms, and said that MasterChef’s lengthy filming schedule did not allow time for other creative pursuits.
“We always said that we would stay together or go together,” he tells Stellar now. “On the show we always lined up together: Gary, George and myself. If one of us wasn’t there, we would refuse to narrow the gap or stand in someone else’s place. Because it didn’t feel right.”
It did not make their decision to walk away any easier. “There were definite dark moments when I sat there and said to myself, ‘What have I done? Have I made the right decision? Should I have taken the money and the safe option and stayed?’”
Ultimately, he says, “I asked myself a really simple question: ‘Is this the worst thing that could happen career wise?’ And the answer was no. I loved working on the show. I loved the people I worked with. I am always going to be thankful for the experiences I had doing that show.
“But the worst thing that could have happened was if I lost the writing gigs. That’s who I am. I always defined myself as a food writer.”
Preston’s time in the TV wilderness was not to last long. Soon after former Network 10 boss James Warburton stepped into a new CEO gig at the Seven Network, Preston was one of the first people he called.
“James came knocking with the opportunity to make a show that didn’t take nine months of my life, giving me the option to spend more time writing or filling in on ABC Radio,” Preston tells Stellar. “I love that. I need new challenges.”
The challenge Warburton offered was Plate Of Origin, a new-format competition that he will host alongside Mehigan and former My Kitchen Rules judge Manu Feildel.
Preston likens the new show to a sort of culinary Olympics, and the format itself nods to international competition, with teams of Australians lining up under the flag of their cultural heritage and cooking their country’s signature dish.
In fact, the show was meant to make its debut after the 2020 Tokyo Games, to capitalise on the spirit and popularity of the event.
COVID may have thrown a spanner into the works, but few know more than Preston that it reignited viewers’ interest in all things food. Last month’s finale of the Preston-free new season of MasterChef – with new judges Melissa Leong, Andy Allen and Jock Zonfrillo – drew more than two million viewers, making it one of the most-watched programs of the year thus far.
Asked if he considers this an encouraging sign for Plate of Origin, Preston replies, “Whenever you launch anything new there is a certain amount of terror. It’s like when you throw a party, you think, ‘What if no-one shows up?!’
“But I’m excited. There is a real hunger and interest in food at the moment and especially now we can’t travel, how great is it to be able to lose yourself in food from India, Lebanon or China?”
Preston says the dishes on Plate Of Origin are genuinely “things you can make at home. They aren’t floating or exploding things. This is everyday food that is spectacular. It doesn’t have to be tricky. In a normal season of MasterChef, it’s the stuff you see in those first four weeks.”
Plate of Origin also gives Preston his first chance to work with Feildel, who tells Stellar that the pair nearly came close to doing so a dozen years ago. “I was not far from perhaps getting a gig on MasterChef. Now we’ve got the best of both worlds.”
Feildel says that despite reports to the contrary, there was never anything but a healthy and supportive rivalry between MasterChef and My Kitchen Rules when the two were at their zeniths.
“In the restaurant industry there are normally three or four restaurants in the same street,” he explains. “We are used to working together. [It’s the] networks that work against each other. Behind the doors of the network, all of us have been hanging out together.”
He mentions a wild week in Greece in 2018, when they travelled there for Calombaris’s wedding.
But Calombaris will not be joining this latest TV venture. “George wasn’t allowed to play with us at Seven,” says Preston. “He was still contracted at Network 10. I’m mindful of the fact it’s hard [for him] – before the promos for Plate Of Origin ran, Gary and I got in contact and said we loved him. All these transition points are hard.”
Preston also sent messages of support and congratulations to the cast and crew involved in this year’s MasterChef, although he admits he did not watch it.
“You know when you split up with your long-term partner, there is no joy in looking at their Instagram feed?” he says. “Because either they are doing really well and you’re not happy – or they are doing really badly and you feel guilty.
“The worst thing that could have happened is for MasterChef to go belly up because it would have said there is no interest in food television. It’s fantastic news for Gary and my career going forward, because it reinforces our belief that food television should be about the food.
“It would have been awful if the show had become something it wasn’t. That would have been hard to stomach.”
During his conversation with Stellar, Preston constantly directs focus away from himself and back towards the topic of food, a tactic he puts down to his training as a journalist.
“My focus as a writer has always been on the person reading,” says Preston, who moved to Australia from London in the early ’90s to pursue a career covering entertainment before turning his attention to food. “And not to look at me.”
But, he adds, he considers himself “pretty boring” anyway. Some of his colleagues have made headlines for the wrong reasons – think Pete Evans causing controversy with his anti-vaccination stance or Calombaris’s legal troubles, which have ranged from an assault charge to an underpayment scandal in his restaurants.
But Preston says it was his first TV appearance, in a cameo on My Restaurant Rules in 2004, that taught him to keep his ego in check. “I could see myself becoming a bit of a d*ckhead,” he recalls. “That’s the nature of telly – you start thinking you’re important. But I’m surrounded by people who are quite happy to give me a free and frank appraisal of what I’m doing wrong, and it’s important to pay attention to that.”
Chief among them are his wife Emma and their children Jonathan, William and Sadie, who he works hard to keep away from the spotlight. “I do the TV,” he reasons. “They don’t.”
Production on Plate Of Origin overlapped with some of the earliest weeks of lockdown in autumn, but for the most part, recent months have given him the chance to spend more time with his family.
“For a dad, that’s a huge privilege to be there and talk to them or do the stuff you wouldn’t normally, like play [video game] NBA 2K20 or watch crap movies with my daughter.”
Feildel believes audiences will see Preston’s sillier side on the new show, explaining that it “is a lot more relaxed. We don’t wear suits and ties; it’s not too serious. We have banter. We have a good time.
“I was often being told to be serious on My Kitchen Rules. But this show is just letting us be who we are. Which is how these shows should be done, really.”
Preston agrees: “It’s a bit more real, like a backyard barbecue.”
Only at this barbecue, teams are plating up more than simple steaks and salad, with dishes that span culinary traditions from Venezuela to Cameroon.
“I’m incredibly proud that we have this range of teams,” says Preston. “They are 10 Australian teams, but each has a different cultural heritage. That’s the reason Australia is such an amazing place to eat.
“And that’s the great joy of food – it crosses boundaries. That’s what matters. That is really at the heart of any of these shows.”
Plate Of Origin is coming soon to the Seven Network.