My husband David will be so disappointed to hear this:

‘Fraudulent’ British celebrity chef faces sack from US TV show after claiming he made Diana’s wedding cake | the Daily Mail

A celebrity British chef who has his own TV show in America faces the sack after he was unmasked as a fraud. Robert Irvine claimed he had helped make the wedding cake for the marriage of Prince Charles and Diana. And in a bid to impress Americans the former royal chef said he was knighted by the Queen – and even boasted that he had been given a castle as a reward for his work in her kitchens.

Irvine, who presents a show called “Dinner: Impossible” on the Food Network channel, has now admitted he cooked up huge parts of his CV. He claimed to have cooked at the White House and received an award for his work from a prestigious US based cooking academy. But following a failed business in St Petersburg, Florida, which left a trail of bad debts he has now been exposed as a liar.

We’re big fans of his cooking show, but I have to admit I’d wondered a bit at how he’d managed to cook for both the British Royal Family and at the White House, as a relatively young man, and still have time to do all the other things in his breathlessly delivered bio at the top of the show. It takes a lot of time to work up to a point in your career where you get to enter such famous kitchens, unless you manage to slide in as a young sous chef on a lucky internship.

Turns out Irvine had been a chef on the royal yacht Brittania for a decade, but not in one of the royal residences… he had been a Royal Navy cook at the base where Prince Charles was based, and must have been but a pup at the time. And he still had to fit in his time in culinary school, which took place around the time of the Royal Wedding.

I hope that he manages to satisfy the Food Network as to his credentials, and comes clean about anything that he may have fudged, but it may be that his show won’t return. Damn, it’s been a fun show to watch, too.

h/t ***Dave, forgot to mention before.

Also, I should have wondered more about Irvine’s working-class accent, which is actually a bit of a cachet these days. It might have mattered more when he was starting out as a chef-in-training on the Royal Yacht, though.

[tags]Robert Irvine, Food Network[/tags]