Who played the chef Gareth Blackstock in the sitcom "Chef"?
Chef! Chef! Chef! is a British situation comedy starring Lenny Henry that aired as twenty episodes over three series from 1993 to 1996 on the BBC. The show was created and primarily written by Peter Tilbury based on an idea from Lenny Henry and produced for the BBC by Henry's production company, Crucial Films. Henry starred as Gareth Blackstock, a talented, arrogant, tyrannical and obsessed chef who has endlessly inventive insults for his staff, unknowing customers, and almost anyone else he encounters. Chef Blackstock's traditional French cuisine with an eclectic flair is served at "Le Château Anglais," a gourmet restaurant in
Chef! really marked out "Chef!", however, was Henry's development as an actor. As the kitchen tyrant Gareth Blackstock, he proved himself capable of representing a multifaceted character far beyond the caricatures of his sketch shows." It also noted that "Chef!" "managed some acute observations on food and contemporary Britain: the celebritisation of cuisine, the pathological obsession with hygiene, the near impossibility of securing genuinely excellent produce in a culture dominated by industrial farming and supermarket giants." Some contemporary critics were less positive, however. Reviewing the second series in the "Evening Standard", Victor Lewis-Smith described it as "...not funny enough to be