Frankie Dunn Made Me Like Gnocchi. I Don’t Like Gnocchi.

I need to make a confession before we go any further. I can’t stand gnocchi.

If I see a packet of it in the supermarket, I walk straight past. So when Frankie Dunn put a plate of it in front of me on Phil In The Morning, I kept my mouth shut and picked up a fork.

Reader, it was gorgeous!

Frankie pointed out that almost every dish she’s brought into the studio is one I’d normally avoid. I’ve now told her I hate scallops. So you know what’s coming at Christmas.

From MasterChef to sold-out supper clubs

To catch you up, Frankie made the final six on MasterChef. One of the challenges had her cooking for a hundred guests on the platform at the National Railway Museum in York, to mark 200 years of the railways. Not bad for someone who, until recently, got Googled and came up as an American baseball player.

These days she’s running pop-up dining events all over the place, and what struck me was how much she’s still learning. After every event she goes home and writes down what she’d do differently.

In Shropshire last week she cooked for 60 at a wine bar and bistro and hired their head chef for the night, just to pick up his tips on serving that many people. “Going into a kitchen and saying ‘I know everything’ is never going to work,” she told me. A bit of humility. I like that.

Her favourite, though, was a private dining room in Manchester. Twelve guests, just Frankie, yards from the table. Relaxed and informal, and she felt part of the night.

The “safe fail” tasting menu

Frankie’s not shy about putting unusual things on a menu. (We won’t mention the rabbit. Again.) Her secret is the small-plates tasting menu. If there are seven dishes and you’re unsure about one, it won’t put you off the whole night. You’d never order it as a main course, but on a tasting menu you’ll try it. She calls it a safe fail.

It works, too. Plenty of diners swore they didn’t like beetroot, then cleared their plates of her salt-baked beetroot carpaccio.

She took the same beetroot to Year 11 Catering and Hospitality students at Lymm High School, right at the top of her road. Eight or nine of the eleven had never tasted beetroot before.

Every single one of them tried it, and nearly all of them liked it. Try getting a room full of teenagers to do that.

She also gets her meat from Hopkinson’s, the butcher in Lymm village, who’ll get in pretty much anything you ask for. Squirrel was offered. Frankie drew the line there. So did I.