Pat McGarry knew he was going home from the MasterChef Australia kitchen before it even happened.
“I woke up really early that day, and I had a really weird feeling,” the 36-year-old council worker tells TV WEEK. “It wasn’t necessarily a bad feeling, but I just had this feeling in my stomach.”
Pat was eliminated during the final day of Heat Week in an intense battle against Luke. But it wasn’t the first time he had experienced a strange sense of intuition during the competition.
“I had this same feeling the day Miin [Wei Looi] got eliminated,” he says. “I got up and I said to him, ‘I’ve got this weird feeling, something’s going to happen today.’ Miin was like, ‘Don’t worry about it, you’ll be fine,’ because he was always super positive. Then afterwards, I was like, ‘Oh no.’”
After four-and-a-half months in the competition, Pat admits walking out of the kitchen brought an unexpected sense of relief.
“I felt like I was so tightly wound for a lot of the experience because I was so nervous and putting a lot of pressure on myself that the first initial feeling was, ‘Ah, I can exhale and breathe,’” he recalls. “The first morning after my elimination it was a beautiful sunny day. I went for a massive walk around Melbourne, got a coffee and was super relaxed. Then I got to get home to see the girls as soon as possible.”
Those girls – his then-pregnant fiancée Emma and daughter Frankie – couldn’t wait to have him back.
“When I got home I felt whole again,” he says with a smile. “I was able to spend time with Frankie and she was just so happy for me to be home. She was like my shadow for the first few weeks.”
Since then, Pat and Emma have welcomed their second daughter, Stevie.
“She’s super chilled out so far,” he recently told TV WEEK. “I wonder when she’s going to start screaming at us, but she’s just taking it all in slowly. She’s loving her feeds and then she snoozes in between those. We’ve been very lucky so far.”
Looking back, Pat still can’t believe how far he made it in the competition. But more than the challenges, it was the people he met that made the experience unforgettable.
“Our group was just incredible,” he gushes. “We were so open in sharing ideas and learning from each other. We weren’t threatened by each other. When the cameras stopped, we were always spending time with each other, eating, cooking, researching, bouncing ideas off each other and just gaining lifelong friends out of it.
“As well as the crew, they’re just incredible. It’s all those factors that I didn’t even really think about before going down there that turned out to be the most amazing part.”
MasterChef Australia airs Monday to Wednesday at 7.30pm and Sunday at 7pm on Network Ten and 10Play.
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