Torode, who has presented alongside Wallace since 2005, added, “I have loved working with Grace on MasterChef over the years. She has been an excellent guest, an inspiring critic and also set some incredible challenges.”
Here’s what we know about Celebrity MasterChef’s newest star.
Grace Dent got her start as a restaurant critic
Dent was born in Hampshire and grew up in Cumbria. She went on to study English Literature at the University of Stirling.
“I grew up on beige foods and mince and Findus Crispy Pancakes and butterscotch Angel Delight,” she told Fabric Magazine of her early experiences with food. “And supermarkets were a big thing in my childhood, because this was when the really big supermarkets arrived and to me, good food was about having the best brands. To be able to have proper Coca-Cola and Smiths crisps… I still love those types of food today.”
She began her career in journalism with an editorial assistant position at Marie Claire before working as a freelancer writing for the likes of Cosmopolitan, The Guardian and, we are very proud to say, Glamour.
After moving to London, she discovered a new culinary world. “I really fell in love with restaurants. I fell in love with the fact that I had come to a city where hundreds of new restaurants open every single year – and hundreds shut,” she said. “It is this ever-moving land of change and plenty and innovation. And that just blew my mind.”
From 2011 to 2017, wrote a restaurant column for the Evening Standard and in 2018, she was named restaurant critic at The Guardian.
“If you look at me and then look at the other restaurant critics, who I love very much, one of us is not like the others! I always say that it is an absolute fluke that I am in, doing what I do,” she said. “The only reason that I am doing it is because it is one of the only things I can do. I have a very small skill-set – I am good at describing restaurants, and I am good at describing tastes and flavours, and I am good at selling the idea of why somewhere is absolutely brilliant, or being able to damn with faint praise to put you off spending £250 there because it is not very good.”
Grace Dent is also a novelist
In addition to her career as a journalist, Dent has also authored a number of books. Her first trilogy, LBD, was published by Puffin Books in the early 2000s. Then came the Diary of a Chav series from 2006 until 2009. In 2009 and 2010, she released two more novels known as the Diary of a Snob series.
She has also written two memoirs, Hungry: A memoir of wanting more in 2020 and Comfort Eating, in 2023.
Comfort Eating
You may also know Grace Dent thanks to her podcast, Comfort Eating, in which she speaks to celebrities about their eating habits.