COME Dine With Me 2025 winner Garry MacDonald has opened up about this season’s ‘fishgate’ – and how much contestants can really get away with drinking before the booze gets confiscated.
Garry, 35, took home the reality show cash prize after knocking his competitors’ socks off with an Ibiza Beach Club themed menu.
His vegan co-star Saoirse was the most impressed with his food, scoring his cauliflower steak a solid nine.
But the cheeky chap has admitted he has no idea how he whipped up her meal as he was two bottles of Prosecco deep when he did it.
In an exclusive interview with the Sun, Garry shared: “You know what’s funny, so many people have asked me for the menu for it and the recipe for the cauliflower steak. But I was two bottles of Prosecco in and I don’t even remember how to make it.
“I was just drinking prosecco and when the camera’s on me I’m just chucking all this stuff together, I don’t even know what I’m doing.
“I was banging all these ingredients on the cauliflower and I remember the producer asking ‘Are you quite finished?’, and I said ‘I’m gonna see what else I’ve got in my cupboard.’
“I just kind of created something with flavours that I have no idea – I would love to know myself how I made it, because so many people have asked me for the recipe and I can’t remember how to make it.”
When asked how much contestants are allowed to drink on set during Come Dine With Me, Garry admitted that although producers try to put a stop to the boozing, they don’t have much success.
“You can just drink whatever,” he laughed. “I gave [my guests] venoms on arrival.
“I kind of felt like we were drunk all week. [Producers] would kind of say that’s enough alcohol, but you’re in your own house. Like what exactly – you’re not going to kick me out of my own house.
“You can see even before the starter most nights, we’ve all had a good drink. You can tell by watching it back, at the interviews at the end of the night, you can see that I’m like, oh my God, I can’t even speak.”
Sadly, not even staying merry was enough to keep this year’s cast from falling out during filming.
Garry’s dinner party in particular went off the rails as two contestants started shouting at each other about a very serious subject – the right way to cook fish.
Fish van owner Bernadette and project manager Lauren had a rivalry throughout the entire series, as they kicked off the first day of filming with a heated debate about sea bass steaks.
Neither of them were able to drop the subject as the week went on, and by the time they got to Garry’s night, it was all out war.
According to the Glasgow-based dinner party host, the women ended up “screaming in each other’s faces”, at which point he decided to leave the room.
Garry opened up about the incident, saying: “See when all the drama kicked off, so my friend was DJing for me. She ended up running so late because she was waiting for over an hour because it had kicked off.
“She was saying that the atmosphere when she arrived was so intense. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife.
“She obviously tried to bring the mood with some music, but you could see the divide.”
He went on to explain that the whole fish fiasco ended with one star in tears and another getting a nosebleed, adding: “I was getting interviewed in my kitchen and when I came out, Lydia was upstairs and she had a nosebleed.
“You don’t see this [on the show], but I think it was the stress of everything. I don’t really know.
“A couple of them were upset so two were in the garden, two were upstairs. I came out and I was like, ‘What’s happening?’ I’ve come out and people are crying, there’s nosebleeds. I was like, ‘What is actually happening here?'”
Thankfully, despite all the drama, Garry managed to put on such a wonderful dinner party that he won the entire series.
He has dedicated this big success to his sister, who encouraged him to go on the show, and has since passed away.
He told the Sun: “Helen would send me these really sweet messages every single morning and then after each night of filming I would go to her house and tell her all the drama.
“She was just the biggest advocate for me. Having that made me who I was on the show.”
