JAN MOIR: Brooklyn Beckham's 12-hour slow-cooked wagyu bolognese tastes like he dipped his toes into it... his 'homemade' sauce was bland splodge of beige. But at £10 for six cauliflower on Uber eats, no wonder he is making a fortune

This is the moment his hungry fans have been waiting for. Brooklyn Beckham has finally dipped his toes into the restaurant world by launching a selection of gourmet creations on the delivery service Uber Eats.

You might not be surprised to hear that his 12-hour, slow-cooked wagyu bolognese tastes like he dipped his toes into that, too, but no. Stop it! Let us not judge too hastily.

Self-styled chef Brooklyn — culinary training nil, professional experience ditto — claims to have come up with the ultimate takeaway menu, a highly curated selection of five items available on a pop-up service called Uber Eats Hosts Brooklyn Beckham.

The 24-year-old nepo baby, first-born son to the great House of Brand Beckham, says the dishes are inspired by his global upbringing. ‘I’ve been lucky enough to live in some pretty cool places,’ he says. Judging by what’s on offer, the coolest place of all was the ready-meals section in a Tesco chiller cabinet.

There is his own recipe charcoal-barbecued corn-fed chicken tikka masala served with rice and naan bread (£15); the aforementioned bolognese, which comes with pappardelle and a parmesan garnish (£15); a portion of Iberico pork and Atlantic prawn gyoza dumplings with a sesame soy dip (£10); a ‘buffalo cauliflower’ dish served with Brooklyn’s homemade ‘secret’ hot sauce (£10); and, of course, his signature dish, the infamous and ridiculous Nanny Peggy’s English Breakfast Sandwich (£10).

The 24-year-old nepo baby, first-born son to the great House of Brand Beckham, says the dishes are inspired by his global upbringing

The 24-year-old nepo baby, first-born son to the great House of Brand Beckham, says the dishes are inspired by his global upbringing

His signature dish, the infamous and ridiculous Nanny Peggy¿s English Breakfast Sandwich (£10)

His signature dish, the infamous and ridiculous Nanny Peggy’s English Breakfast Sandwich (£10)

The ‘dishes’ were available for two nights only via Uber Eats on Thursday and Friday this week. They were obtainable only between the hours of 5pm to 10pm and, even then, only in a small catchment area of East London.

As pop-ups go, it certainly popped up and went — and Brooklyn didn’t make, prepare, supervise or serve any of the food himself. Judging by his Instagram account, he was thousands of miles away, modelling shoes.

‘Oh shut up! What is the point?’ cried daytime TV queen Lorraine Kelly, when she was told that chef Brooklyn wasn’t actually cheffing his own menu. You are cheffing kidding. ‘I could do better than that and I am the worst cook in the world,’ she added, previewing some of his grisly fare on her ITV show.

Lorraine doesn’t mince her words, just like Brooklyn doesn’t mince his spring onions when he’s not preparing the garnish for the gyozas he didn’t make. He’s a pro, right? So he would thinly slice them instead, were he not doing something more relaxing, like reading his tattoos and not cooking.

To be fair, Brooklyn’s gyozas were fine, even if the wrappers were on the glutinous side of gossamer. Paper-thin doesn’t mean wallpaper, Brooklyn! Still, if you got 70 similar dumplings in a Costco pack for £9.99 (which you can) you’d think, hey, not bad at all.

However, I can’t say the same for the buffalo cauliflower dish, which turned out to be six measly cauliflower florets; six vegetal clots of soaked grease, further brutalised by a harsh spice mix on their journey from sprightly crucifer to indeterminate sponge.

His own recipe charcoal-barbecued corn-fed chicken tikka masala served with rice and naan (£15)

His own recipe charcoal-barbecued corn-fed chicken tikka masala served with rice and naan (£15)

The wagyu bolognese which comes with pappardelle and a parmesan garnish (£15)

The wagyu bolognese which comes with pappardelle and a parmesan garnish (£15)

A portion of Iberico pork and Atlantic prawn gyoza dumplings with a sesame soy dip (£10)

A portion of Iberico pork and Atlantic prawn gyoza dumplings with a sesame soy dip (£10)

A ¿buffalo cauliflower¿ dish served with Brooklyn¿s homemade ¿secret¿ hot sauce (£10)

A ‘buffalo cauliflower’ dish served with Brooklyn’s homemade ‘secret’ hot sauce (£10)

Brooklyn’s ‘homemade’ sauce was a bland cup of beige splodge that tasted of despair. If you were considering beating him with a spatula until he confessed his top-secret recipe, don’t bother.

The chicken tikka dish was rich and bland, rather like Brooklyn himself. The naan was blistered and alarmingly robust, perhaps a bit like old Peggy herself. If you were to regard this dish as a low-price-point ready-meal or a takeaway offering from a middling small-town curry restaurant that was about to go bust and the cook had run off with the waitress, taking all the spices and know-how with him, then you would not be disappointed.

Meanwhile, the meat rubble masquerading as a bolognese and squatting on a tangle of (not bad) pasta isn’t going to thrill anyone. Neither are diners likely to be impressed by the grandiose menu descriptions, redolent of the kind of rosy detail found on a dating-app profile.

In Brooklyn-land, prawns are from the Atlantic, the pork is always Iberico, the chickens are corn-fed and barbecued over charcoal (really?), the beef is prized wagyu, and the meat sauce is ‘slow-cooked’ — but when is it ever fast-cooked?

All of it is engineered to give the illusion of luxury ingredients and specialness, delicious treats created by some marvellous culinary genius. And we all know, with the best will in the world, that is not quite true. Especially when it comes to Brooklyn’s mythical signature dish, Nanny Peggy’s English Breakfast Sandwich.

Self-styled chef Brooklyn ¿ culinary training nil, professional experience ditto ¿ claims to have come up with the ultimate takeaway menu. Pictured with wife Nicola

Self-styled chef Brooklyn — culinary training nil, professional experience ditto — claims to have come up with the ultimate takeaway menu. Pictured with wife Nicola

As the chef explains: ‘My Nanny Peggy taught me how to make her English breakfast sandwich when I was five, and it’s been my favourite ever since. That was one of my earliest memories of loving cooking.’ All I can say is that she has a lot to answer for.

The sandwich arrives upside down, wrapped in chequered paper, with griddle marks on the sturdy toast. Inside is a congealing tri-decker of fried egg slicked with tomato sauce, two slices of empurpled bacon with a thick rind of fat and a pair of sausages split down the middle and laid on top.

This version is awful, an unappealing brick of breakfast that might even make Nanny Peggy a bit jeggy on her leggies, should she ever dare to try it. It is not Brooklyn’s fault that a hot breakfast sandwich doesn’t travel well, but the bacon isn’t even properly cooked and the sausages aren’t boasting about where they come from, which is just as well.

I cut into the egg and the yolk still trickles down the sandwich, even an hour or so after it was cooked. Somehow, this reminds me of the fingernails still growing on a corpse. Do you know what? I think I’ve lost my appetite.

On his online television cooking show, Brooklyn was always going on about this sandwich, almost as if he and the Beckhams were trying to copyright the damn thing. And I wouldn’t put it past them.

Yet to witness him make one was like watching a farmer calving a heifer who was having a breech birth. It’s awkward and embarrassing. You have to look away at the messy bits. At one point he even tried to pick up an egg with a pair of tongs, and I am talking about Brooklyn, not the farmer.

Yet none of it ever seems to matter, or dent his popularity. He is the chef who never chefs, the cook who can’t cook. For Brooklyn, it is all about image and surface and hits on Instagram, where he has 16.4 million followers and where there is no end to his culinary posturing and no beginning to his talents.

When it comes to his skills, he seems to have developed a pathological gift for ignoring the mocking torments of others and just smiles on, his face as plain as a scone, his slow-cooked thoughts dozily assembling under his carefully gelled hair.

Perhaps typically, the classiest aspect of Uber Hosts Brooklyn Beckham was the stylish packaging. The food arrived in beautiful black boxes, which had been packed and stacked inside glossy black bags bearing his name.

A nice touch, even if six cauliflower florets for a tenner is hard to swallow, in more ways than one. No wonder Brooklyn Beckham is making a fortune.

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