Could this be the best comeback in the history of Aussie cooking shows? After a flour-fail of a blunder in their first Instant Restaurant, My Kitchen Rules team Simone and Viviana have made an incredible comeback – by scoring the highest Instant Restaurant score in the show’s history.
With a goal to bring new Italian food to the table (they say they were tiring of Italian food always being associated with foods such as bolognese and carbonara), the self-confessed ‘Modern Italians’ did exactly that.
The best friends worked tirelessly with many sleepless nights to produce the best menu they could – and received even better feedback than they had expected.
Simone, 32, tells New Idea that their dishes were created with “passion”.
“Me and Viviana, we hustle. Obviously, we come from Italy… from a different way of living, where everything is a little bit harder. So we just basically worked day and night in order to produce, such high quality dishes in the competition,” he says.
Presenting some classic French dishes with some twists – plus Simone’s own pasta recipe, a prawn and potato ravioli (which looks mouth-watering good!) – the pair received high praise.
After eating the ravioli dish, Manu told them: “We often get asked what is the dish that you remember to be the best on MKR – and I think that’s the new one. I’m absolutely jealous of people like you who can make pasta like this because I can’t.”
This sent Simone into a freeze. Usually a man of many words, he didn’t know how to respond. Later on in the episode, he revealed he’s always been very hard on himself but did concede that he’s extremely proud of what he and Viviana, 31, have been achieving.
“I feel like this is the highest emotion I’ve felt in my life,” he shared.
It wasn’t just the judges who were left impressed. Fellow contestant Lawrence says Simone and Vivian’s dinner was “hands down the best back-to-back dishes that have come out”.
In the end, the total score from the table and judges was 104 out of a possible 110 points. Colin revealed that this was the “highest instant restaurant score in the history of MKR.”
“We were aiming for like 93… we knew that we’re good, but we never thought that we would make a record,” said Viviana.
The pair tell New Idea their first dessert failure pushed them to succeed and that it “was all part of the evolution in the stars”.
They add that they’ve come to understand that they don’t perform so well under pressure, so need to be more careful with timing moving forward.
“We never even think about the fact that Simone and Viviana, who are just, like, two idiots, could actually achieve something of this caliber,” says Viviana.
Although they’ve been awarded their highest score, they pair still has their eyes on the competition, saying brothers Rob and Liam remain their biggest threat.
“They were our biggest friends in the competition – but also our biggest competitors, because their skills are just unbelievable,” says Simone.
We can’t wait to see what’s up next for these two – we certainly wouldn’t want to be up against them!
