The Best Pastry Chef is back on the air on M6 this Wednesday, September 6, 2023. This season 12 is special because it is haunted by the departure of Marie Portolano.
This is an unprecedented situation. Marie Portolano split in two for the start of the 2023 school year and appears on two competing channels. Viewers can see her on France 2 in Télématin, alongside Thomas Sotto, and on Wednesdays on M6 at the animation du Meilleur Pâtissier. The Six competition returns this Wednesday for its 12th season, but it is difficult not to keep in mind the departure of its presenter who is working for the public service at the same time.
Marie Portolano had been the host of the Best Pastry Chef since 2021. While she had made her mark on the show, we learned on June 10, 2023 that she left the sixth channel to host Télématin on France 2 in place of Julia Vignali (who is also a former host of the M6 ??competition). With Le Parisien, she assures us that it was the management of France Télévision who came to recruit her: “I have the feeling that Télématin does not refuse. It’s a daily, with three hours of live. I was happy also to tell me that I found my journalist cap 100%.”
However, the pastry competition was filmed in its entirety two months before, in April. The host was thus able to box all the episodes before her departure. But does M6 plan to remove the presenter of the Best Pastry Chef from the editing? “We have never been in this extreme”, assured Guillaume Charles, member of the Management Board of the M6 ??Group in charge of programs and content, on September 4 on franceinfo.
“Marie is absolutely present in the program as she would have been if she had stayed with us,” he added. No competition concerns therefore, and fans of the Best Pastry Chef should see the host on screen until the final. For now, we do not yet know the name of his replacement or his replacement for next season.
