Getting to finals week of MasterChef: The Professionals is a dream come true for Santosh Shah. The Nepali chef now based in London wowed the judges on his way to making this week's final six.
Cooking for celebrity chef Andrew Wong in last week's semis, Santosh impressed with his stunning take on dim sum - his Yomari dumplings from Nepal were stuffed with chocolate, cashew nuts and chilli, topped with orange and cinnamon. Santosh went on to cook a second dish for the judges - crispy chilli chicken, Indo-Chinese style, with crispy lotus roots, seaweed and vegetable pickles, served with hot and sour soup and crispy noodles.
The judges were so impressed that they announced his food was the best dish of the day and sent Santosh straight through to the finals round. On Tuesday, he will be up against five other chefs out of 32 who started in this year's edition of the hit BBC TV series.
Another two rounds testing creativity, speed and culinary skills will see numbers whittled down before an overall champion is crowned in front of millions of viewers on Thursday.
"I always wanted to bring Nepali cuisine to the world stage and this show has given me this opportunity," Santosh told the BBC.
The show has also turned him into a celebrity back home in Nepal, where he has been interviewed by top TV shows and his face is all over national media.
Santosh is not the first contestant to say MasterChef is very tough.
"We have to be mentally strong, we are timed, and put under immense pressure. I practise each dish numerous times in advance," he said.
"Then there is the pressure of the camera and the judges are quite demanding. The competition is getting tighter and more demanding as chefs get eliminated in each round."
'I am a risk-taker'
Santosh was born in Karjanha, a small village in the south-eastern district of Siraha, near Nepal's border with India. The youngest among seven children (two sisters and five brothers), he was just five when his father died. For pocket money when he was 10 he would sell plastic bags and other items at a local fair.
"With my friends, I used to walk up to 7km [about 4 miles] on foot, buy a few loaves of 'pau roti' [bread] and sell them at the fair," Santosh recalls. "I also worked as a labourer at a canal construction project in my district."
He managed to study up to class 10 when he was 15 but didn't pass school leaving exams.
"I then went to Gujarat state in India along with friends from my village in search of a job," Santosh said.
Hundreds of thousands of Nepalese people - from the hills and cities, as well as from the southern plains - head to India for work. Santosh began as a dishwasher at a local restaurant in Ahmedabad, the biggest city in Gujarat.