As Round Two of My Kitchen Rules 2026 nears its end and Kitchen HQ is on the horizon, contestants have been getting candid about what the experience was like behind the scenes.
When the Gatecrashers entered the scene, the drama kicked up a notch as new rivalries were born.
As the newcomers got to know the chaos of the competition and the original teams (or “OGs”), they also received quite a shock at how everything operated off-camera.
While contestants like Angus and Simon have raved to WHO about the support they have received from production, Gatecrashers Zoe and Zac revealed they had a completely different experience.
Speaking to WHO, the Newcastle best friends exposed just how much meddling production does to steer the narrative in a dramatic direction.
The Gatecrashers were left in the dark
For those who have never been on reality TV, the production behind the scenes can be quite intimidating. For Zoe and Zac, they were surprised by how little support they actually received when entering this new territory.
“I was shocked by the amount of back-of-house work that you have to do,” Zac told WHO. “And I guess the lack of communication and handing over of information from the production team was very minimal as well.
“And I feel like Zoe and I are very question-based people. We want to know things, and we want to be able to forward plan. But literally to be met with, ‘We can’t tell you this because X, Y, Z’, and it’s just like, [they] can, because it actually has nothing to do with the competition, you know?”
Zoe and Zac expose behind-the-scenes rules invented after Round One drama
The pair also joked about all of the production terms that were never explained to them on set, revealing that poor behaviour from previous contestants led to some new rules being formed for the Gatecrashers to keep things civilised.
“On that, and the fact that we never get any insight, in our first Instant Restaurant, [production] was like, ‘You have to go in with your game face, your food faces,'” Zoe said. “And I had no idea what ‘food faces’ was, and so we thought we had to look really serious.”
“The whole thing with food faces came up because the first round of people were so loud and obnoxious and could not be quiet when the producers asked them,” Zac explained. “And so they then created this ‘food faces’ statement so that people knew they had to be quiet when the teams [who were cooking] were entering [to serve their food].
“So we were like, ‘What does this mean?’, and then it took probably about three episodes, like three days of filming, for us to be like, ‘So what does this actually mean? What are we supposed to do now?’
“And [the original teams] were like, ‘Oh, it’s just because we couldn’t be quiet.'”
While you would think that keeping quiet while the hosting team serves their food is a given, it turns out the teams this year still needed the reminder.
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