Matt and Luke were crowned My Kitchen Rules 2019 Champions overnight, taking out the title and $250,000 prize money with their modern Australian menu.
The boys served five courses to 10 judges in the historic Grand Final, being praised for their technical skills and powerful flavours.
Though they had scored a near-perfect 59/60 in the Semi Final, the boys were considered the underdogs to Ibby and Romel in the finale.
In the end, “underdogs” Matt, 27, and Luke, 28, beat out the frontrunners by four points, with 92/100 to their 88/100.
Matt and Luke faced-off against Ibby and Romel in a close Grand Final (Image: Channel Seven).
“We’ve had worse starts to the day!” Luke jokes to TV WEEK about waking up winners today. “Bit of a spring in our step this morning.”
We caught up with Matt and Luke after their win to see how it feels to be crowned MKR Champions and find out their plans for the future.
How does it feel to be My Kitchen Rules winners? Is it a bit surreal?
Matt: Yeah, I don’t think it’s really sunk in yet. Even waking up this morning, Luke and I were still high fiving, we literally woke up like that.
It’s been a long time coming, I can’t imagine how it felt to finally know if you’d won! Did you have a party with friends and family for the big reveal?
Matt: Yeah we booked a place up here in Newcastle, just a big function room for friends and family. We had quite a big turn out which was really, really good. And obviously found out the result and had a few more beers!
And Luke, is your daughter Harriet aware something huge is going on, or is she a bit young to know what’s happening?
Luke: Yeah she’s probably a bit young, but she’s just… I think the whole thing around it was that we wanted to make it worth it for ourselves and for our families. It was a big sacrifice for both of our families and I sort of feel like, now we’ve got the result we have, that makes it worth it.
The winners celebrate their victory (Image: Channel Seven).
You were labelled the underdogs in the Grand Final, did it feel good to prove any naysayers wrong and show that you have the skills to be crowned champions?
Matt: We didn’t really want to prove anything to anyone, we just wanted to do the best we could. Obviously the filming was a while ago and we knew Ibby and Romel had been great throughout the competition, but we weren’t really focussed on that. We were more just focused on putting up the best plates we could, and I think we did that.
When you get to watch the episode back you can see all of the comments made by the judges while they were eating your menu, how did it feel to hear the high praise from such big names within the industry?
Luke: Yeah, we never got to see what they were seeing while they were tasting the food, so to get that feedback it was very rewarding. Obviously such high profile judges giving wraps to your food is a pretty big deal and we were pretty pumped by that.
Matt and Luke’s Peach Bellini dessert received high praise (Image: Channel Seven).
Have you had a moment to think about what you’ll do with this great opportunity?
Matt: Yeah we’ve been organising something for a while now, actually, we’re going to do these pop-up restaurants in our local area. We’ve got two events that are fully booked already, we haven’t advertised any more as we were waiting to get through this weekend basically, but yeah we’ll be doing some pop-up restaurants in Maitland and in Newcastle. And we’ve been really well supported by family, friends and the local community already so it’s pretty overwhelming, and with this prize money we can make sure we make the pop-ups really high quality.
And is the goal to one day own your own restaurant, or are you just leaving the future open for the moment?
Luke: Yeah we are keeping our options open at the moment, we’re sort of right at the start of our journey at the moment, I think, so we don’t know what doors will open. The thing about Matt and I is we’re really hard working and, while the show was airing in the past few months, Matt and I have been working tirelessly on ideas and making connections and networking to try and get ourselves in the position where we can make the most of this opportunity.
Matt and Luke are keen to make the most of their MKR success (Image: Channel Seven).
You’ve also built up a following, with a lot of fans rooting for you. Was it nice to have that support from the Australian public?
Matt: Yeah, we were just going through some of the Facebook comments and that has just been absolutely incredible, the amount of support that we’ve gotten, especially off the back of our Semi Final win, I think that’s when we really started to see people were really wanting us to win, which was such a good feeling in itself.
With all this public support, do you think you’d ever consider taking on another TV role?
Matt: I think with everything we’re pretty open with, you know, opportunities that came our way. Luke’s got a young family so I think reality telly is probably something he’s not keen to jump straight back in to, but I think with everything we have going on we’re always keen to look at opportunities and if something on television came up we’d definitely take it.
Congratulations once again to Matt and Luke on their incredible win!
