British chef Elliott Grover is cooking for the stars for the fourth year running.
The Oscars 2026 ceremony will be held on March 15, at the Dolby Theater. It’s not until the Best Picture title has been named (will it be One Battle After Another or Sinners that clinches the top award) that guests descend the stairs to the Grosvenor Ball for their meal. “You can hear them coming and you know it’s go-time,” Grover says.
This is the fourth year running that the head chef at London’s carnivorous Cut at 45 Park Lane (sister to The Dorchester hotel just over the road) has been entrusted with cooking for Hollywood’s most prestigious awards show. Still though, he works under the lead of Austrian-American chef to the stars, Wolfgang Puck, who has led the menu for the Grosvenor Ball (otherwise known as the official Oscars afterparty) since 1994. “He is very fun,” says Grover, “but he’s crazy, so I go in with the mental preparation of knowing something will change.”
I spoke to Grover almost three years ago to the day ahead of his first Oscars, and back then, bold tenacity was the main thing that got him the job. “I asked if I could go along and Wolfgang said ‘Yes, why not?’” he said in 2023. Fast forward to 2026, and it’s a given that the London-born chef is on the line up. “I just keep going along,” he shrugs.
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The years have instilled a sense of calm. “I was so nervous back then. I was in the kitchen days ahead of time trying to prepare. It’s no stress for me whatsoever anymore.” Instead of a prepped, organized approach, Grover is heading to the kitchen for the first time just two days before the ceremony, without a plan. “I’ll find everything out tomorrow morning,” he says. “I’m gonna enjoy it and that’s it – there’s no point worrying about it.”
While the final menu might be up in the air until the last minute, what Grover does know is that fish and chips will once again be on it, as it has been every year. “We get slammed on the fish and chips – and thankfully it’s the easiest thing to make,” he says.
More a canape-style snack than the greasy, newspaper-wrapped seaside staple of Britain, Grover’s Oscar’s fish and chips is a mere handful of chips, with a delicate goujon of fish and a dollop of tartare sauce. “In an ideal world, we’d use haddock, skin-on, but for a couple of years, we’ve used seabass, skin-on,” Grover says. “It all depends on what’s best in LA at the time.”
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He’s also prepared to speculate that a beef dish will make the final cut. While Grover’s inaugural year intentionally skipped red meat (“they know their steak over there … I want to put British food on the map,” he stated at the time), in 2024, he served a delicate slice of Wagyu in a classic Yorkshire pudding, and in 2025, the team took on the notoriously tricky beef Wellington. “It was our biggest challenge so far – I was worried I’d miscalculated the timing,” he says.
Grover is betting on a Wellington – “it’s the most impressive,” he says. Fortunately, Cut’s head chef Ibrahim Arif is out in LA to help: “he’s very good at wrapping Wellingtons.”
Surprisingly, given the calibre of guests, off-menu requests are rare. “The most common thing we’re asked for is just chips,” Grover says. “That’s easy.” While in previous years Grover has run his Oscars menu for a limited time at Cut restaurant, this year the only people who get to taste it are those invited to the 98th Academy Awards.
The Oscar’s menu 2026 in numbers
- Number of guests served: approx. 1,200
- Number of chefs in the kitchen: 200
- Number of Yorkshire puddings made in 2024: 1,000
- Approximate time spent preparing: 4 days
- Hours in the kitchen on the day: 16
- Estimated number of kitchen meltdowns: a few!
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