Military TV, Television - Military Times

Toughest ‘Dinner Impossible’ yet: Gourmet chow for 850 grunts

He’s whipped up gourmet fare for 40 team executives at the Philadelphia Eagles’ stadium using only what he could beg, borrow or steal from pre-game tailgate partiers.

He’s prepared a five-course meal for 160 passengers on a speeding train, operating out of the tiniest kitchen he’d ever seen.

But Chef Robert Irvine’s toughest “Dinner: Impossible” assignment yet may be the one at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms, Calif.

His mission? To cook a pre-deployment meal for 850 tired, dirty and hungry grunts with 1st Battalion, 2nd Marine Regiment, just back from the field after 30 days of desert warfare training.

In “Dinner: Impossible,” Irvine goes up against some of the most challenging cooking situations any chef could imagine, typically armed with little more than his wits and a whisk.

This time, Irvine has just seven hours, an austere field kitchen complete with uncooperative ovens, ingredients like leather-tough sirloins and instant potatoes, and a leather-tough gunnery sergeant keeping the pressure high.

But in his corner for this latest episode of the new Food Network series — along with his two sous-chefs, George and George — are six motivated Marines.

This latest challenge was particularly important to Irvine, who spent 10 years as a chef in the British Royal Navy before embarking on a civilian culinary career that has included stints as executive chef for the Trump Taj Mahal Casino Resort and Caesars Atlantic City in Atlantic City, N.J.

“It’s the most amazing thing to eat something good before you go somewhere,” he said in the episode. “I’ve been there, I’ve lived that.”

Irvine works his usual miracles, pairing his rough-and-tumble Royal Navy ingenuity with culinary flair to turn lackluster grub into haute cuisine. Without any mallets on hand to tenderize the rubbery sirloins, Irvine arms the Marines with aluminum vegetable cans, exhorting them to hammer away at the meat.

He speaks with particular pride about his plans for dessert, an old shipboard standby known as a “Manchester tart.” Here too, he marries supplies from the base commissary with mess hall material to create gourmet greatness.

Deep into the hectic afternoon of cooking, Irvine proves he can hang with the leathernecks. When one Marine complains that a food tray just out of the oven is too hot to handle with thin oven mitts, Irvine mutters under his breath, grabs the tray — barehanded — and dumps the food into a prep pan.

The thunking sound in the background is Marine jaws dropping to the mess hall floor.

(SPOILER WARNING: We’ve seen the full episode already, so read on only if you want to find out whether chef pulls it off.)

With just minutes to go before the Marines queue up for chow, Irvine has whipped up an impressive menu, one that includes:

• Dijon pork tenderloin

• Cheddar mashed potatoes

• Corn bread

• Mushroom Marsala sirloin

• Chicken cacciatore

• Shrimp scampi del ray

• Penne primavera

• Three-cheese peas

• Manchester tart

Still, there was one more challenge left — moving 100 trays of food from the field kitchen to the Quonset-style mess hall next door, all under the watchful eye of the Marines’ battalion commander, Lt. Col. James D. “Jimmy” Christmas.

Did the chow pass muster? As one Marine put it, “I guess it tasted like … home, I guess.”

No better compliment than that for a chef.