Cundari boss cooks his way to victory on Come Dine With Me Canada
Aldo Cundari built one of Canada’s leading independent advertising agencies from scratch, earning the respect of the notoriously cynical advertising community along the way. Odd, then, to hear him portrayed on Monday as someone who walks around “like he has a pickle up his butt.”
Welcome to the frequently zany world of reality TV, where producers bring together ordinary people from various backgrounds and invite enraptured viewers to watch the sparks – and insults – fly.
Cundari was one of five contestants on the W Network reality show Come Dine With Me Canada. Comprised of five 30-minute episodes, the show features strangers who take turns hosting a dinner party and get scored on everything from their hospitality to their food by their fellow hosts.
Cundari, right, and his Come Dine co-stars
Cundari’s menu of seafood paella, sautéed shrimp and Crostata Lamponi (raspberry tart) garnered an impressive 32 of a possible 40 points to earn him the $1, 000 grand prize, which he donated to Villa Charities.
The meal is a staple of Cundari’s frequent dinner parties, and he claims that the paella has even elicited praise from his Spanish friends.
“If I do something I have to do it right,” he said. “I wasn’t worried about getting the highest score – if I produced the best meal I would get the highest score.”
It didn’t come easy though. Over the course of the five-day shoot, Cundari was frequently portrayed as aloof, required to eat food bearing names like booger salad, and even had his main course sabotaged by a fellow contestant – who also accused him of serving cheap wine (he exacted revenge on his antagonist by serving the same wine in a different decanter, which she said tasted far better than the original).
The shoot also provided Cundari with some eye-opening insight into the machinations of reality TV, as producers shaped his on-screen character through the use of selective editing. “They made me out as this rigid asshole,” he said Tuesday with a good-natured laugh. “They pigeonhole you in these slots and then find the characters that mesh with that.”
Cundari had some misgivings that his professional reputation would be compromised by the show (over the course of the two-and-a-half-hour program, viewers discovered that blueberries give him gas and he has a lousy sense of rhythm, but also that he’s an accomplished sculptor), but he told Marketing that clients were texting him throughout the night to tell him how uproariously funny it was.
“I love trying new things, but it was not what I expected,” said Cundari. “I don’t know that I would ever do a reality TV show again.”
The experience also provided some fascinating insight into the Canadian consumers that advertisers and their clients are trying to reach, said Cundari. “We have a very diverse audience out there, it is not as pigeonholed as we think it is.”
