The life and work of the celebrity chef is a perilous and uncertain business. How many TV cooking shows do you have to host before becoming officially famous? How many years do you need to spend in a kitchen before you can sell out and scream at other chefs about how they’re doing it all wrong? How many restaurants can you put your name to before you dilute or totally wreck your brand?

Luke Mangan (a sort of maybe celebrity chef) found the latter out the hard way last weekend when he lent his name to an exclusive pop-up event at Bondi Beach that claimed to represent the food from his “19 restaurants around the world”. I would just like to suggest that 19 must very much be the number where you have too many restaurants, and adding pop-up events to that list is a very dumb idea indeed. Tickets to ‘A Moveable Feast with Luke Mangan’ were sold for up to $165, and 3,500 attendees descended on the event to wait for food that would never come. Many attendees opted for local takeaway options instead of the long-awaited eight-course experience.

Mangan’s credibility was seriously dinted by this nasty turn; but is he now beyond redemption? How does he line up against other Australian celebrity chefs? To answer these pressing questions (for reality TV casting agents, supermarket publicity departments, cookbook lovers, and foodies with a bit too much money for beach food), here is a simple metric test for overall trustworthiness: would you trust them with your newborn baby?

In light of Mangan-gate, here is a non-exhaustive list, from most to least trustworthy:

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Kylie Kwong

Kylie Kwong’s reputation took a dint when she hosted a Chinese New Year market at Sydney’s Carriageworks earlier in the year. The event was overcrowded, the waits were long, and though food was supposed to be served until 10pm, it had very much run out by 8pm.

Market stalls and pop-up restaurants will ruin even the most trustworthy celebrity chefs, but Kylie Kwong is as trustworthy as they come. She apologised profusely and I think she deserves a second chance. Kylie is a legend. I’ve cooked her food multiple times based off her SBS TV series, Heart and Soul — currently being rerun on the Food Network — and it’s never not delicious.

The verdict: I would totally leave my baby with Kylie Kwong, maybe even for a few weeks while I work furiously to perfect her recipes.

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Adam Liaw

Adam Liaw seems like such a fucking sweetheart. In fact, anyone who came through Masterchef seems very trustworthy: Poh Ling Yeow, Julie Goodwin, that kid who did the deserts really well, some other people in the later seasons, and uh… did I mention Julie already?

Anyway, Adam is so goddamn trustworthy he’s willing to put his entire career on the line with a damn tomato. In his latest cookbook, The Zen Kitchen, there is a recipe for a tomato, with salt. That’s it. You don’t even need to do anything to the tomato, other than maybe put the salt next to it, and cut it once or twice. It’s called a Hiyashi Tomato (which translates to Chilled Tomato) and the recipe requires one “very, very good quality tomato”… and, yep. Adam trusts himself enough to trust a tomato enough to… you get the picture.

The verdict: I would totally let Adam Liaw babysit for an afternoon if he asked nicely enough. As long as he puts in a little more effort with my quality baby than he does with his very, very good quality tomatoes.

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Iain Hewitson

Look, everyone loves Heuy. I get it, but let’s just think for a minute. His first TV show was called Healthy, Wealthy and Wise which okay, didn’t exactly fit with his brand of smothering red meat in butter and oil. His ensuing TV programs were called Huey’s TV Dinners and Never Trust A Skinny Cook. It’s kind of like he gave up just a bit on the Healthy and Wealthy stuff. Still, that’s honest, at least, and honesty usually leads to high levels of trustworthiness.

Plus it’s Heuy! That is all the justification I need to give.

The verdict: I bet Heuy is the best bloke in real life and a wonderful grandfather, so he can take my baby and cook it a TV dinner anytime. The baby may get bloated, but never, ever trust a skinny baby.

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Curtis Stone

Curtis Stone is probably Australia’s most famous celebrity chef, if only because his head is literally everywhere you walk. He’s the face of Coles for both My Kitchen Rules and Masterchef, despite having literally nothing to do with either show outside of maybe a gratuitous cameo, if they can afford to book him.

Part of the reason he’s seen as trustworthy is because he has decided to leave us all behind and live in LA, where he has two restaurants which none of us can afford to eat at (so who knows what the food is like). This has impressed everyone enough to let him pop up around at Christmas in advertisements to tell you to eat as much red meat as humanly possible. It’s a shame he doesn’t do more for Easter, because he literally has the head of an Easter Island statue. Branding synergy!

But that’s where he loses most, if not all, of his trustworthiness points… I mean, are we totally sure he’s even human? I mean look at that head… I just don’t trust it. How do we know he’s not some giant carved rock infused with life by an Ancient God, brought back to this world to cook inoffensive yet always timely lamb dishes and sell cuts of discount meat from Coles? I mean his name is Curt Is Stone. This is some Illuminati-level shit.

The verdict: You could totally let a statue babysit for you. It’s fine. It’s a statue. Just leave the baby at its feet; it’s not going to do anything to your baby.

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Luke Mangan

See above. A PR disaster walking around pretending to be a celebrity chef that no one really recognises anyway. His brand is cooked.

The verdict: Yeah, like I’m going to leave my starving baby with a guy who can’t be bothered feeding people who have paid $165 for fancy beach food.

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Pete Evans

No. Seriously, don’t trust him… the only less trustworthy person is Belle Gibson who literally claimed she could cure cancer. Even then, I kind of get the feeling Pete Evans really, really wants to claim he can cure cancer but someone somewhere is doing right by him and telling him to zip it.

“Pete, seriously, shut the fuck up, stop talking,” says a wise and overworked publicist. Pete gets up, goes to the window, and looks out on a rainy beach, sighing. “But I really, really think calcium from dairy can remove the calcium from your bones… most doctors do not know this information.”

The verdict: I wouldn’t trust Pete Evans with anything, and most certainly not with a newborn baby. He would most likely give it a bowl of bone broth and leave it in a room by itself while he drinks raw milk and munches re-activated almonds before having a surf, without any sunscreen, because he thinks it’s poisonous.

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Sam Twyford-Moore is a writer of fiction and nonfiction, whose work has appeared in The Monthly, Los Angeles Review of Books and, more frequently, on his laptop. He is the former Director of the Emerging Writers’ Festival.