With a jewellery box in his hand.

“I've got something planned tonight,” he says, and sadly for the guests he's not talking about an edible meal. “Lisa doesn't know what it is.”

But soon enough, we do. The Italian stallion is planning a marriage proposal. How romantic. There's nothing like sharing your most intimate moments with 2 million or so of your closest friends. We'll all be sure to pop around to your place the morning after the wedding too, to see the sheets hung over the balcony. Ah, sweet.

Moving right along, the entree is served and Lisa gives her big-eyed bug-eyed stare as she scrutinises - her word - Pete and Manu as they eat the entree. “Please just give us something,” Lisa says and Manu obliges with the cold stare of the killer we all suspect he was before he ran away to join the French Foreign Legion, which is undoubtedly where he learnt to speak with that outrayzhurss accent.

Manu is a little disappointed with what's on his plate. He likes his mussels wet and sloppy, he says, so “you've got the salt dribbling down your chin and you just don't care”. But Lisa and Stefano's mussels aren't juicy at all. “It's 'affway there for me,” Manu says, and Lisa spits back a terse, “OK. Thank you” like she really, really means it.

“Are you overwhelmed?” asks Pete.

“Yep,” says Lisa, ever chatty.

“Do you think you might have missed something on the plate?”

“I don't know,” she says, warming to this whole conversational thing. “You tell me if we did.”

This is getting tense but any dummy could tell her what's coming. “Seasoning,” says Pete.

D'oh! A pinch of autumn, a sprinkle of spring and everything would have been fine.

The dish was flat, insists Pete, but Lisa says she likes it this way because she hasn't spent the last 20 years dousing everything in tons of salt. And besides, she thinks, any fool can see the dish is round with a little raised rim on it. Flat my arm.

Cue the critics. It was bland, say the Italian gatecrashers. It was mismatched, says Sophia, who hasn't just crashed the gate, she's ripped it off its hinges and taken the fence down too. “I'm not saying it was the greatest dish,” says button-eared Dan in a passably bitchy impersonation of Sophia. Wouldn't you just love to see these guys battle to the death in the Hunger Games arena?

Back in the kitchen, Stefano is cooking rabbit ragu, a little known character from the Merry Melodies cartoons. “I am in total command of this main course,” he says, thus demonstrating beyond all doubt that he bunked out of school the day they covered “hubris” in Classics.

Enter Manu, with a handy definition of ragu, which is basically anything other than what Stefano is cooking. “Yeah, but I've got to add the stock,” says Stefano by way of defence. It sounds about as convincing as “the cat ate my homework”.

“If I don't get a perfect main course I'll probably be very, very upset,” says Manu, and given that killer stare of his I'd be afraid. Very afraid.

Now Pete has got them worried about seasoning and Lisa is looking so stressed he'll be lucky if he gets out of there without being a-salted.

Stefano, though, is blissing out. “I feel like I'm in my element cooking risotto in the kitchen with my love. Perfect.” That's enough of those herbs for you, sonny Jim.

Lisa is convinced the ragu is a bit ragone; it needs to be wetter, so she convinces Stefano to add some wine, against his better judgement. “I just have to trust her,” he says.

“I'm wearing the trousers,” she says. In this ragu Rashomon, I know whose version of events I believe.

As the risotto hits the table, the gatecrashing Mamas wonder where all the creamy goodness is. Pete thinks it looks lousy but tastes good. Manu thinks it tastes great but it's not a ragu and it's not a risotto and that's that. “I've never got this in a restaurant, anywhere,” he says, steam spurting out of his Gallic ears.

“I meant to make it dry,” says Stefano, feeble lies streaming out of his Latin mouth.

After the ad break, the voiceover tells us it's been a “disappointing” meal at Carnevale, which is a bit rough as no one has scored the SA "Daters"' restaurant yet. Hang on, is that SAD eating? Hmmm.

But maybe dessert can turn things around. They're making cookies, and Lisa tells us she's been playing with them since prep time. By my calculation that's about 36 years; I'm not sure I'd be telling everyone you're planning to serve up some Play-Do from the mists of time, Lisa.

While she's deep in regression therapy, Stefano is working on a semi-freddo that is “perfect”, even if he says so himself. Which he does. But frankly I'm not convinced half a chocolate frog can be as good as all that.

Outside, Kieran the Goth, Dungeons and Dragons geek is holding court (medieval - naturally of course), telling the judges he doesn't think of cookies as a dessert. More a snack.

And will it be one big cookie or lots of little ones, he wants to know. And will it be gooey on the inside and crunchy on the outside? And will it have little flecks of green in it and make your head spin? And will he need a prescription to get one? And does anyone else have the munchies or is it just me?

“Can we just move on from the cookies?” says Sophia and for once everyone agrees with her.

When the dessert hits the table, big Sam the Tas man says it is exactly what he imagined from reading the menu. Which is a shame. “It's one big whopper of a cookie on a plate with a dollop of ice-cream and some chocolate sauce,” he says.

He's clearly much better at visualising menus than I am. I had imagined something quite tasty and instead it looks like a big blob of poop. With raspberries around the outside.

“Holy cow,” says one of the gatecrashing Italian mamas, and it is just possible she is referring to the orifice from which the dessert appears to have emerged.

“This is Lisa's dessert,” Stefano reveals to the camera in a very special and intimate moment of blame-shifting.

“Tonight's a celebration for you guys,” Pete says after gagging on a few spoonfuls. “I don't know how to say this, but this dessert is not good.”

'It was hers, it was hers,' Stefano's bad Jiminy says.

Sophia says it's like eating a slug and while we knew she grew up poor, this really is a revelation. Wow, girl. You are forgiven. A bit.

Nastassia has managed to eat not just hers but also Kieran's. “I thought it was great,” she says, “but then I may just have been…”

“…hungry,” Kieran finishes, thus doubling his contribution to their collective effort thus far.

In the kitchen, Lisa and Stefano brace themselves for a mauling. Out on the deck, the guests happily oblige. Sophia, naturally, has the best line (does she write them herself or is Don Watson ghosting for her?) “It was such a waste of my stomach space,” she says. “It was a train wreck.”

The guests' scores total a brutal 13 out of 50. The 49 they need to be safe looks a bridge too far. “It's disappointing,” says Lisa. “It's dog eat dog.” Which, to be fair, may have been a better menu option than human poo.

“We're in a pool with sharks right now,” she adds, at which point Carnevale is raided by a SWAT team from the RSPCA on suspicion of cruelty to animals.

While Stefano and Lisa are being bundled away, the judges deliver their verdicts. They've scored just as harshly, giving them 25 out of 60. That's a total of 38 and it has them firmly anchored to the bottom of the leader board.

But on the upside, that's like being the leaders of the bottom board. Right?

Lisa is certainly accentua-ate-ing the positive. “Despite our miserable score, I'm still walking away with happy memories,” she says. It seems cruel to point out that she has momentarily mixed up her priorities so that real life becomes (ridiculously) more important than reality TV.

“At least we've got each other,” she adds, gazing lovingly at Stefano.

Ah, sweet. See you at the wedding.

kquinn@fairfaxmedia.com.au