Anton Piotrowski, Steven Edwards: ‘MasterChef: The Professionals is like steroids compared to a Michelin star’

While it is a risk to go on MasterChef: The Professionals, doing well, especially if you win, can be more of a boost than getting a Michelin star. 

Or at least, this is the view of our latest Grilled podcast co-host, Steven Edwards, who won series 6 in 2013, and his guest in this week's episode, MasterChef: The Professionals winner in 2012 and chef-owner of restaurant Roski, Anton Piotrowski.

Anton discussed how, while a three-star restaurant won’t usually have to worry about getting reservations and will likely be full every night, a one-star restaurant won’t be like that necessarily and in those cases a competition like MasterChef, that is shown to a large number of people and makes people aware of the chefs behind their food, is likely to be more of a boost to bookings than getting a Michelin star.

Anton said: “MasterChef is like steroids compared to a Michelin star, and that’s not me dissing Michelin or knocking it on the head, it’s a massive achievement for any chef to achieve it.

“You can have three-Michelin-stars on the window [and] you will be full, [but] one star [and] you're still gonna struggle to fill a restaurant. And that's the power of MasterChef. It's absolutely incredibly powerful and you can ask Steven, to this day people still come to see him because of MasterChef.”

Anton also went on to discuss how his attitude towards running a restaurant has changed.

He said: "A Michelin star is something, that when I was younger, I pushed too hard for. I thought that was my goal and that was what food was about, and accolades on your walls and going sitting down at an AA dinner table [was] what made me a chef. And then I woke up one day, after having this star, and it didn't change the food. Didn't change what I was doing. All I wanted to do was make my food taste tastier and start understanding what the chefs behind me were here for."

He didn’t want to come off too negative towards Michelin though and continued: “Michelin is an amazing accolade to have, but it's not what I get up for in the morning.”

It’s the restaurant and cooking for the customers that are important to him now.

“I'm not chasing it anymore at all,” he said. “I'm chasing a full restaurant and I'm chasing a business. Because, what people have forgotten about in the hospitality industry [is] we're running businesses not running things to chase for stars and when you start doing that, you see restaurants opening and closing all the time.

“This restaurant, every table has to be full and if I'm not filling every table every day, lunch and dinner, then I'm not doing it correctly.”