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The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Sentient_Flesh on 2025-10-04 10:22:36+00:00.

A/N: All links below lead to sources in Spanish. The translations of the relevant excerpts have been done by yours truly.

I’ve always had a passing interest in cooking shows.

Not necessarily because of the food in them, as when I grew up they were just TV background noise or something that I would put on (back when I still watched the idiot box) because there was nothing else to watch.

But there was always some mind-numbing quality to them, in a positive way. You’re not really seeing anything even remotely interesting by watching someone make a stew unless you also want to make one, but it’s unsurprising, predictable, and delightfully boring despite how much the guy onscreen wants to make it entertaining enough for the prospective audience. However as I arrived at the age where one begins to actually seek things to watch, I realized that there’s a surprisingly interesting cultural aspect to them.

Bear with me for a moment, we’ll get to the drama soon. Consider the average episode of the American edition of Kitchen Nightmares, and now compare it with the average episode of the British edition. There’s a significant difference, isn’t it? The former’s hectic, heavily edited, Gordon Ramsay gets angry all the time at the insane morons who he’s trying to fix; while in the latter, he may just be trying to help a nice old lady that runs a failing ethnic restaurant. Different countries can see shows that are on paper the same and put them in rather different ways.

This also applies to the genres within the shows. When it comes to food-related ones there’s essentially three of them: The Cook Cooks genre, The Food-related Person travels to some place to talk about local food genre, which also has the Foreigners Eat Weird Things subgenre inside of it, and the Cooking Competition genre.

In Spain, the first two had had dominance pretty much since cooking shows have been a thing in the television market, but the latter, the big contests, were pretty much non-existant until 2013, when everything changed with the start of not one but two different cooking contest shows: One of them was Top Chef Spain, which closed the kitchen 4 seasons in, and the other…

So, this is about being some kind of Master Chef?

Masterchef Spain is a rabbit hole with more drama in its history than canned seafood in a Spanish pantry. Which is to say, a lot.

For those who are unfamiliar with the format, and specifically the Spanish version, you just have to know this: A number of amateur cooks do several challenges for a professional jury, the one who performs the worst in the episode gets expelled, and it goes on until only one remains, who wins. The winner gets a hefty cash prize, an editorial deal to publish a book of their recipes and a seat to study at a prestigious culinary academy.

Now, even if the reader is completely unfamiliar with a set up like that, that a cooking Battle Royale, in itself, is prime ground for drama entirely by itself. But surprisingly enough, no. Of course, given a country like Spain, that has been doing “reality” shows with the same format to the point that we have way too many editions of Big Brother (For the curious, 33, there are 33 Spanish editions of Big Brother) it isn’t surprising that we’re kind of accustomed to how things should go.

So instead, most of the drama is external to the competition itself. For example, one of the three judges, Samantha Vallejo-Nájera is the granddaughter of an actual fascist mad scientist (I’m not joking.), who was trying to find the “genetic causes of marxism” in order to breed it out through eugenics and among a lot of nasty things involving literal babies, he also ran an actual concentration camp. Oh, and she’s also homophobic. Another of the judges, Jordi Cruz, confessed to exploiting his workers while on International Labour Day, and is generally a jerk. And the third judge, Pepe Rodríguez… Well, there’s nothing really out for him, but I guess for some he can come out as a bit of an ass.

Then there’s stuff like rigged auditions, celebrities that have participated and then have gone to the media to complain about heavy editing to make up narratives that were never present in the actual set. The usual.

And from the more professional side, there’s quite a bit of criticism too:

I rather liked the first season since you never see the likes of Paco Torreblanca or the Roca’s in Prime Time, and I greatly valued RTVE’s bet [to do this] in a general-public channel. There were some great culinary moments (…) However, since the second season, the show began to have a more central stage, with mothers in the set, cries and other moments that were more in place in Big Brother. The culinary side was relegated to [just] two minutes and the more important parts were the presence of the Spanish army, bullfighters and fashion experts.

But this isn’t about any of that. This drama is entirely about an actual thing that happened in the competition and was the first notable event to break into public discussion.

Large feline consumes sea bug.

Alberto Sempere, at the time, was a freshman of medicine from Valencia who at just the age of 18 had become the youngest contestant in Masterchef Spain. He had plans to study allergology and open a specialized restaurant for people with food intolerances and common allergies.

He wasn’t very well regarded by his older co-contestants, who at the moment the fiasco happened, in 2015, were already gossiping about how he was just “playing” around. But, he nevertheless, in the eliminatory challenge at the end of the second episode of the third season, presented his dish: “Lion eats Shrimp”.

On paper, it wasn’t bad. A potato, decorated with spices to resemble a lion, with roasted red pepper, lightly grilled shrimps and, even if it heavily pains my Andalusian sensibilities, a strawberry gazpacho that was to be poured into the plate after it was all done.

In practice… Well… It was kind of goofy looking.

But at least it was edible, right?

Well, no, the potato was raw, it hadn’t been boiled properly. (As a slight aside, he should have just baked it, boiling the thing was a bad idea in the first place, but that’s my personal opinion.)

Originally, Sempere’s idea was to make a moussaka, a Balkan dish that I’m wholy unfamiliar with, but that, while having a conversation with Cruz for some reason horoscopes came up and as it happens, he’s a leo. Cruz then told thim that he “wanted to see a lion reflected in [Sempere’s] cooking” as a way to pump him up and he took it too literally.

The first one to say anything was Rodríguez:

A sense of humour is important in the kitchen, but seeing this, I can’t find anything funny, sorry. I mean, this is an insult to my intelligence, an insult to the jury, and an insult to the 15.000 people who were left out [of the contest] in this third season.

Harsh. Sempere tried to defend himself, arguing that it was a dish that was supposed to show the fierceness that the judges had asked him to, but Rodríguez didn’t allow a single excuse. Then Cruz also intervened:

You haven’t understood anything. I’ve been a cook for a long time and I demand everthing from myself every single day; [Never] in my whole life I’ve seen crap like this [and worse] you trying to make it pass. That’s a mockery of our work, boy, a mockery. (…) Not a single cook in the Children’s Edition had the gall to make a dish as moronic as this one and try to trick me into believing it’s another one of your ‘homages’. No, no, that’s a mockery. The day you arrived, I told you that I was going to demand your best, your everything, remember that? I told you that I was going to keep this1? I return it to you.

(1 A glove, to be kept until Sempere was kicked out or won, as a motivational method.)

Alberto Sempere was kicked out of the contest, right then and there. The first in three seasons in which the judges didn’t even ponder it offscreen or anything. It was inmediate, fulminating. The host (Eva) even asked about them not going off to think but she was harshly shut down by Rodríguez. That was it.

Later, in the obligatory interview after the expulsion, Sempere broke down:

I had the best of intentions with this dish, I just wanted to follow the recommendations of the jury and and show that I was a lion in the kitchen but it didn’t go as I expected and I’m sorry (…) I swear that [a mockery] wasn’t my intention, I was told that I had to show fierceness and I had no idea that the potato was that raw, otherwise I wouldn’t have put it forward, I thought it was al dente, but, but, it’s embarrasing, I… I don’t even deserve to be here. I’ve done it so poorly… (…) Honestly, I feel terrible, I don’t think I’m going to cook again, I’m not sure if I’m ever going to cook again. (…) After this, I’m going to go inside a hole and hide for two years.

Cruz, along with Vallejo-Nájera then went out of the stage to the set where the interview was being done and tried to comfort Sempere, telling him that he had simply made a mistake, but that it wasn’t the end of the world. However, by that point, he just broke down sobbing.

**…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/1nxqc91/cooking_contests_lion_eats_shrimp_one_of_the/