He’s been called “the Justin Beiber of cooking” – a 17-year-old wunderkind who’s already creating 14-course, $160-a-head pop-ups, and who hopes to open his first fine dining restaurant before his twentieth birthday.

His name is Flynn McGarry and he’s hitting Australian screens this evening, following in the footsteps of Heston Blumenthal and Nigella Lawson by setting tonight’s pressure test challenge on MasterChef Australia.

Contestants will have two-and-a- half hours to recreate the American teenager’s “Beet Wellington,” a vegetarian take on the classic British steak recipe consisting of beets cooked in smoked beet juice, covered in a mushroom duxelle, and wrapped in puff pastry. The Wellington is then sliced and served with creamed beet greens, a roulade of smoked dates, and shiitake mushrooms tossed in a miso and beet bordelaise sauce. The recipe contains a whopping 62 steps.

“Everyone is moving away from fine dining, but that is what got me obsessed,” McGarry said. “I do think there are some things about fine dining that are outdated. My goal is to have a younger approach to fine dining.”

Younger? You can say that again. McGarry started a supper club in his parents’ house before he had even hit puberty. By 16, he was running a three-day-a-week, twelve-seat “perma-pop-up” in New York, which he named Eureka after the street he grew up on. (The pop-up is now closed, though you can subscribe to the mailing list to keep abreast of future developments. Good luck getting a seat, though.)

In 2014, McGarry made the cover of the New York Times Magazine. He has appeared on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon and the US Today show and has been profiled by both Vogue and Time, the latter naming him one of the 30 most influential teenagers of last year.

“I don’t know how the MasterChef contestants do it,” McGarry said. “The pressure that they are put under, I was shocked.”

This sounds a little disingenuous from someone who lives for the pressures of the professional kitchen. McGarry has apprenticed at Eleven Madison Park, which was last week named the third best restaurant in the world, and has cooked for US President Barack Obama on the White House lawn.

Pressure? Shocked? Pull the other one, kid.

Theresa Visintin, Anastasia Zolotarev, Chloe Bowles and Heather Day will compete against each other in McGarry’s pressure test after failing to impress the judges last night with their lemon and coconut chewy biscuit.

This despite what nearly became the season’s “white chocolate velouté moment” – a reference to last season, when John Carasig spoiled a seafood dish in the third leg of a relay challenge by disregarding literally everything his teammates had cooked prior to his arrival – with airline pilot Brett Carter “going rogue” and changing Harry Foster’s whiskey-laced trifle recipe to a lemon and honey tart one instead.

There was palpable tension backstage after Brett’s stint in the kitchen ended, as Harry asked him bluntly: “Are we doing a trifle or are we doing a tart?”

“It is a really daunting thing, judging (contestants’ dishes),” McGarry said. “I had never really done anything like that. It was really stressful.”