Cuteness Alert! 'MasterChef Junior' Season 3 Premieres Tonight
The most charming cooking competition around, MasterChef Junior, returns to the airwaves tonight for a third season, a short three weeks after season two came to a close. Fox has a hit on its hands, so the network is giving fans a big serving of what they want: precocious kids who cook better than most adults, allcompeting for a $100,000 prize.
Graham Elliot, the Chicago chef who serves as a judge-slash-mentor alongside Gordon Ramsay and restaurateur Joe Bastianich, told us the cast will be more diverse this season in terms of the kids’ interests and experience. With two popular seasons having already aired, casting was much easier this time around. “In the beginning, no one knew what the show is going to be like,” he says. “Now you’ve got kids around the country being told by their parents and friends that they’re amazing cooks and they need to audition.”
Also of note? The upcoming restaurant takeover. “It was harder and more intense than any we’d seen,” he says. “It gets really heated. You forget they’re kids.” But the children are still charming; there’s none of that “jaded, who-can-I screw-over-to-win” behavior you get from grown-up contestants, he notes. Elliot also promises that a forthcoming “aged” ingredient challenge will be quite entertaining. “The judges will kind of go through a transformation,” he said. “It will be really funny and freak everyone out.”
Elliot cooks for the tiny toques near the end of season two.
Speaking of transformation, Elliot has gone through some serious changes himself. He dropped a significant amount of weight over the past year following a sleeve gastrectomy surgery that reshaped his stomach. The impetus came during season one of MasterChef Junior. “Joe and Gordon and I were talking about being healthy and childhood obesity and I realized I was talking the talk and not walking the walk,” he recalls. “I’m seeing these kids from the show, and I have three of my own children, and I’m hitting 400 pounds. I didn’t want to live like that. It was time to take drastic measures. I didn’t care if I couldn’t be a chef anymore. I needed to do this for bigger reasons.”
Today, he’s lost more than 150 pounds, and even ran a marathon last fall. “I’m working out and eating healthy. I’m excited about the path I’m on,” he says. His main advice for those with weight loss issues involves banishing certain words from your brain. “Try to get out of your head ‘nutritious’ or ‘diet’ or ‘healthy.’ When you hear a lot of those things, you feel you’re being judged right away. Don’t tell me I can’t have a cheeseburger. Now I’m going to eat six. It’s psychological, and it’s stress eating. Instead of focusing on what you can’t have, focus on what you can. Today I’m going to eat three green things. I’m going to have three different fruits today. I’m going to have a different protein every day this week—chicken, shrimp, fish,” he says. “You realize you can get full on things that are lighter and more natural rather than a huge bowl of cereal or pasta.”
Check out Elliot and the new contestants on tonight’s premiere and follow along as he live-tweets. One of Elliot’s harshest critics will be watching: his 8-year-old son. “Milo always gives me the recap,” he says. “And then he tells me I’m not as good as Gordon because he has more restaurants than I do.”
More on ‘MasterChef’ and the cast:
Who we think we’re going to love in 2015
Who were you rooting for in the last MasterChef Junior finale?
Surprisingly buff chefs that inspired a few of our Thanksgiving workouts
Are you a ‘MasterChef Junior’ fan? Let us know!
