5 days ago
9
Some people eat to live, for fuel and function and nutrition. Others live to eat, defining their lives by outrageous dining experiences and elaborate plates that pull big numbers on Instagram.
Sofia Levin is something else altogether. Her pursuit of flavour is as relentless as her spirited curiosity that transcends trends, culture and geographic borders. Driving down suburban streets with her is like taking a meerkat for a walk; she’s always peering out the window with wide eyes, jotting down the names of new spots. At the table, she orders widely and asks questions, lingers a little longer to land on the story worth telling from inside tiny kitchens.
For Levin, the food writer turned MasterChef Australia judge, food is something to be understood, traced and held up to the light. It’s culture, history, politics, memory and family. It’s also pleasure, of course. What tastes good and is worth talking about always takes priority. The marriage of those two things – the joy and meaning in meals – defines the way she eats, writes and, now, judges.
Season 18 of the hopes-and-dreams factory called MasterChef Australia begins airing this month. It’s 36-year-old Levin’s third season as one of the all-seeing eyes behind the flaming cloches, alongside the show’s alumni Andy Allen and Poh Ling Yeow, as well as French chef Jean-Christophe Novelli.
Every Australian has questions about what happens behind the scenes on the show. “Ask away!” Levin smiles. We’re talking over a breakfast of omurice and okonomiyaki at Papirica, a sleepy cafe in Collingwood serving home-style Japanese food on dinky mismatched plates and cups.
Most people have questions about the temperature of the food on the show, especially when it finally arrives at the judging bench. I’m more interested in what happens to all those packets of spices contestants open for each new challenge. (Turns out, they’re packaged up for cast and crew to take home, from a big communal market that lives on set, where Levin tops up her grocery shot during the long months of filming.)
This is, in some ways, the third generation of MasterChef Australia. I vividly remember tuning into the first season from my uni sharehouse, and encountering a challenge where Yeow, inaugural winner Julie Goodwin and their cohort had to decorate cupcakes.
The show seemed to require higher and higher stakes in subsequent years. Cupcake became croquembouche; audition tapes swapped out stir-fries for sous-vide proteins. By the end of a series, it was not unusual for a steady and smart cook to be booted off for not executing a delicate and elaborate dessert of foams and smoke. The actual food felt far away.
That’s no longer the case. Levin’s guiding principle begins and ends with taste. “No.1, it has to be delicious. Something can be extremely technical and not taste good. When somebody does something really technical that they don’t have clarity on, or they can’t explain, it’s not always a good dish. In fact, quite often it’s not.”
She brings up criticisms by “Facebook warriors” of last season’s “back to win” premise, where previous seasons’ runners-up competed for the title. “Some people like seeing their old favourites and others just feel like it’s unattainable, or they want to see someone’s journey from the start again. This season, we’ve got those home cooks and the atmosphere is different.”
Each iteration of the MasterChef Australia judging panel features people who cook professionally, and one lone critic; when Levin was first announced in 2023, it was to step into the shoes left vacant by fellow critics Melissa Leong and Matt Preston.
Despite this role – the expert eater who’s travelled widely and tasted even wider, whose job is to put dishes and flavours into geographic and social context for the benefit of the viewers at home – to detractors, they might as well be wearing a name tag saying “not a cook”.
”People say, ‘Oh, well, get in the kitchen and then you can tell us [your opinion]’,” says Levin. “And to that I say, ‘Do film critics also produce? Do music reviewers also play an instrument themselves?’ It’s a different skill. There are very, very few chefs who can write like I write. It’s a different but inextricably linked skill. I also don’t think any of them have eaten as much as I’ve eaten.”
The response to Levin’s ascent from writing behind a byline (including for Good Food) to discussing it in front of millions of TV screens has been exceedingly positive – she’s thoughtful and encouraging, and deploys the kind of wide, genuine smile that can comfort even the most harried contestant. Last year, she was nominated for a Silver Logie for Most Popular New Talent. But hanging onto the outlook and opinions she’s always held close – only now with more eyes and ears trained on her – means being told to stay in her lane occasionally. Not that she listens.
“Food is a window into things that are really important, and it can be extremely political,” she says. “Anyone who says food is not political or tells me to ‘stick to food and not politics’ while writing about it is privileged beyond their means to be able to say something like that. Food is all about politics. The evolution of a dish – that’s a historical timeline for everything. It’s slavery, it’s immigration, it’s the wealth divide, it’s everything.”
For half the year, her life is all about the show, and in the other months, attention returns to her website, Seasoned Traveller. To tell stories about eating curiously, she dives into census data, scans suburbs for demographic shifts, seeks out venues that exist just below the surface of mainstream attention.
“I like looking for places and venues that are reserved or known within their communities,” she says. “They’re often so excited to just see you in there.” There’s a particular pleasure, too, in anonymity in spite of her fame. “Those places, they have no idea who I am. And I love it.”
Her path into those stories was shaped early. “I was exposed to travel from a really young age. I was extremely lucky and privileged in that sense,” she says. With a British mother and extended family overseas, her childhood was punctuated by trips that expanded her palate and perspective in equal measure. She describes herself as the quintessential eldest child. “Very big only-girl, older-sibling-energy when you get to know me,” she says. “I’m the oldest and I ask the most questions. I am project manager of the Levins.”
The days and weeks before we speak have really put her “project manager” position to the test. In between long days shooting MasterChef Australia, she’s been working behind the scenes to pull off two major fundraising events close to her heart.
As part of this year’s Melbourne Food and Wine Festival, Levin drew on her hospo network and Logie-level popularity to transform Wesley Place – the charming courtyard tucked between historic bluestone buildings on Little Lonsdale Street in Melbourne’s CBD – into the site of an open-air food festival one day, and an intimate dinner and high-stakes auction the next evening. Both events were to raise money for MND Victoria, an organisation working to provide care and support to people living with motor neurone disease.
As anyone whose life has been touched by MND will tell you, once it enters your life, it’s impossible to stop caring. For Levin, that happened in 2022, when her father, Greg, was diagnosed. Her first fundraising events happened soon after: a series of dinners centred around a gallery exhibition of her dad’s photographs. “He was a really avid photographer. He never did it professionally, but he was very good.” On all those family trips, Sofia would eat and pitch stories about the food scenes and dishes she encountered around the world, and Greg’s images would sit alongside her words. “So he was published!” she says with a proud smile.
Levin’s father, a doctor and co-owner in an East Melbourne fertility control clinic, died in 2024, as her first season of MasterChef Australia was airing. The timing created a strange overlay of public and private experience: a career high unfolding alongside a profound personal loss. “I had a lot of people reach out, who I didn’t know, on Instagram saying, ‘Hey, I saw your dad for a procedure, I only met him once, but just wanted to say he made the whole thing bearable, he was my favourite person in there’ – that’s a very private thing to share.”
But knowing that her memory of Greg as “a very calm, gentle, kind man” extended far outside the reaches of the family unit was a comforting reminder.
At the fundraiser dinner, Levin flits between guests, chatting enthusiastically with hospo high-rollers, fans of the show and guests living with MND and their carers. Introducing the auction, she jokes that guests are only allowed to talk to Yeow – who sits by her side – if they place a bid. Dinners at exclusive restaurants Yiaga and Chae go for several thousand dollars, as does the priceless spot at the MasterChef Australia semi-final dinner (“You’ll meet the judges, taste the food, feel the energy, and even have to sign an NDA,” the program promises). By the end of the night, the two events have raised more than $65,000 for MND Victoria.
“You read about motor neurone disease, you hear someone who’s got it, I get the emails, all of that,” Levin says. “But I feel simultaneously deeply affected by it but also disconnected to it. I don’t know if it’s just an automatic compartmentalisation, so I can get along with day-to-day life. It’s not until I’m working on something like this … that I’m really moved by it and connected to it again.”
For now, though, there’s the show. Another season, another cohort of hopefuls, another five months of long days and late nights. “I do love it,” she says. “But it’s long.”
The day after the finale is filmed in the next couple of months, as the confetti is swept away and a new title is handed over, Levin and her fiance will hop on the first flight out, so they can make it to London in time for her grandmother’s 90th birthday. It’s a day where her roles – judge, traveller, advocate, writer, granddaughter, family project manager – all sit right alongside each other. On the other side of the long flight are the two most important things: family and a good meal.
MasterChef Australia premieres at 7pm on Sunday, April 19, on Network Ten and 10Play.
Want more TV? We’ve got you.
- Newsletter: Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.
- Outlander: The Scottish time-travelling hit is coming to an end. Its Australian star David Berry talks about the show’s other great love story.
- The Testaments: Ann Dowd was terrifying in The Handmaid’s Tale. She thinks you should be more scared of its sequel.
- The Miniature Wife: Succession star Matthew Macfadyen had his pick of scripts when he said goodbye to the billionaire Roy family. This is what he chose to do next.
- Your Friends and Neighbours review: Season two find’s Jon Hamm’s light-fingered thief up against a formidable foe.
- Streaming guides: What to watch this week; and what to watch this month.
