It was 5:00 a.m. on a hot morning in June, and I was brushing my teeth for the second time. Standing in the marble-and-gold bathroom of a luxurious San Francisco hotel I could never have afforded, I looked at my face in the mirror: watery, sleep-deprived eyes, toothpaste foam bubbling at the edges of my mouth, wrinkled pajamas. Wearily, I began to brush again. Past my own face I eyed the small film crew. The cameraman and the boom operator—a jacked-up dude covered in tattoos—and a no-nonsense lady who had a way with microphones, and a young PA named Sarah, had wedged themselves into this bathroom on the fifth floor of the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco, where I was staying for the thirteenth season of Top Chef. Of the original field of fourteen, I was one of the six contestants remaining.
“That’s great, Kwame. You’re doing great,” Sarah said. “Beautiful!” I brushed for a few more seconds until I heard her say, “Got it, baby, thanks.” The camera light switched off and I spat. Welcome to morning reality.
It should come as no surprise that the experience of being a participant on Top Chef is a surreal one. In our suite of rooms my fellow contestants and I repeated these mundane tasks over and over again for the benefit of the viewers at home. We gamely pulled back our covers, stumbled and restumbled from our beds, ran and reran brushes through our hair. Capturing all of this were pairs of cameramen and boom operators, overseen by producers who moved before us like shoals of fish, always close by but never making contact. In the evening we repeated this quasi-performance for what was called “night reality.” In between, we were wrung through long hours of outlandish high-pressure culinary challenges. Yes, the knives were real and very sharp. Yes, the food had to be delicious. Yes, the pressure was extremely intense. But what chef in the real world has a surf-and-turf challenge sprung on them with no notice? Or must, in fifteen minutes, turn junk food into food porn to please an influencer?
For the last two months, as we traveled throughout California, we had all lived in this twilight world, between reality and performance, populated by an ever dwindling number of contestants—some friendlies, some neutrals, and some enemies. We were accompanied by a large crew, and sometimes we were visited by the judges, who materialized like holy visions to make pronouncements and decide our fates.
Though the audience would never see people like Sarah or the musclebound cameraman—and perhaps because the audience would never see them—interacting with the crew was the closest any of us came to being normal while filming. You could have an actual conversation with them, because you could be certain it wouldn’t end up on TV. Except, of course, when you forgot that your producer-friend was working you. Then, months later, when the show airs and you see yourself talking trash about a fellow contestant in a confessional, you realize they were just doing their job when they called you “baby.”
As long as the cameras were rolling, you couldn’t be sure of anyone, neither judges nor fellow contestants. Every interaction was a calculation, on my part and on theirs. Reality television distorts but does not fundamentally alter character. I was still Kwame, the Kwame I was when I woke up that morning, before the cameras came in. But superimposed over this was Kwame the character, the made-for-TV version of myself. He was less likable, perhaps, but acted more comfortable than I felt. He took my own confidence and exaggerated it to the point of arrogance. He was what I assumed the producers wanted. A perfectly three-dimensional person does not make for good television.
Internally, of course, where the cameras couldn’t see, I was just as terrified as I’m sure the other contestants were. I was scared to make a mistake, scared to come off as a fool or an amateur, scared to be myself. To cope, as we all did, I had a strategy, one I’d honed for years: pack all that fear, all that self-doubt, all that weakness, tight into a box, close it, padlock it, and then put my head down and work. Don the mask of indifference and get on with it.
As for the other contestants, whether it was Jeremy Ford, who ultimately won the show, or Amar Santana, or anyone else, there was a similar dynamic at work. The characters we played for the cameras were heightened or flattened or distorted versions of our true selves. There was a real and a real plus. Jeremy was a laid-back dude, just not quite as laid back as he appeared. Amar was exuberant, though perhaps a bit more vivacious before the cameras. Isaac Toups really was a good ol’ country boy from Louisiana, but he wasn’t nearly as folksy after we wrapped. Each of us had a role to play, and as the show went on, by unspoken agreement with each other and the production team, we became our characters more and more.
And yet, I realized, this wasn’t anything new, not to me and not to any other minority. In some ways I had prepared my whole life for reality television. Ever since I was born, I had been made aware that the world saw me in one way, thanks to the color of my skin, regardless of how I saw myself. This was a lesson learned on the streets of the Bronx and in the dining rooms of Baton Rouge and in the kitchens of Per Se and EMP. I would not survive if I didn’t know how to play that game, to hustle to get ahead, to write my own story, and to manipulate, to the extent that I could, how I was seen.
But as I was coming to realize, that was only half of the battle. The other, and perhaps the more important part, was how I saw myself. When I closed my eyes, when the cameras were off, when there was no one but myself, who was I then, what Kwame did I want to be? The thing about filming Top Chef is that the production company basically quarantines you. Televisions are unplugged, cell phones confiscated, and computers removed. You’re in a terrarium, unaware of the world outside.
For relief, I used to sneak out the service elevator of the hotel and wander around the streets. In Los Angeles, where we spent time at the beginning of the season, I walked up and down Hollywood Boulevard. What a bizarre feeling it was, as if I lived in another dimension than the people in their cars or streaming out of the gym or spilling out of bars. Who was real and who wasn’t, I couldn’t tell. Without cameras around, it felt like everything was a waste of time. Without cameras around, I struggled to know how to just be Kwame. It was unsettling. On those almost-delirious nocturnal wanderings—the only time I was alone for months—it occurred to me that perhaps it was precisely because I didn’t know who I was when no one was watching that I sought the spotlight so hard, spending those early mornings in the green room at Chopped, fantasizing about becoming a star. When I got back to the hotel, I felt relief not only at not being caught, but also at returning to being seen, stepping back into a character I knew by heart.
When I first got a call from a casting director asking whether I wanted to apply to be on Top Chef, I was conflicted. A few years earlier Liz Bacelar, who had been so supportive at Coterie, had set me up with a producer of hers. We were at Liz’s weekend house upstate. I made a meal as elegant as the setting: Brussels sprouts petal salad, port-glazed quail with corn velouté, golden cauliflower polenta. The producer, a middle-aged white woman, loved the meal, putting her spoon to the side as she sucked down the velouté. As we sat around surrounded by empty plates, I expectantly awaited her judgment: Was I ready for TV?
“The dinner was amazing, absolutely amazing,” she began. “It’s clear you know how to cook.” I waited as she paused for an uncomfortably long time, searching, it seemed, for what to say next. “The problem is, Kwame, and I hate to say it, but America isn’t ready for a black chef who makes this kind of food.”
“What kind?” I asked.
“Fine dining: velouté. What the world wants to see is a black chef making black food, you know. Fried chicken and cornbread and collards.”
And there it was, finally spoken aloud. I wasn’t mad at this woman; she seemed apologetic enough. But as the evening stumbled on, now painfully awkward, I pondered my choice. Fame and maybe fortune dangled before me, but the cost would be my conforming to ignorant stereotypes of what a black chef “should” be. Or I could stay on my own path, applying all the technique I had gleaned to make the best food I knew how. Success, or at least exposure, was less certain. Just before she left, the producer handed me her card and told me to get in touch if I ever changed my mind. I thanked her, never changed my mind, and never called. If the price for being on TV was to become a caricature, I’d rather remain uncast. But because my first restaurant, the Shaw Bijou, was set to open that October in Washington, D.C., I needed all the help I could get. Win or lose, as long as I didn’t bomb out in the first episode, Top Chef would hugely boost my exposure. As one of my partners put it, “Any press is good press,” and so I agreed to appear on Top Chef.
A lot of chefs will tell you they grew up loving cooking shows. Julia Child. Jacques Pépin. Ina Garten. I grew up loving cooking shows too, but those gentle chefs weren’t for me. No, for as long as I can remember it has been the hard-core competitions, the shows that treated cooking as a blood sport (and along the way somehow made sous-viding pork loin seem heroic) that I loved. Iron Chef was my jam. By the time I was eight, the original Japanese version had just begun airing in America. I followed the epic battles of crustaceans and butternut squash like it was March Madness, year round. When my mom was out for her catering gigs at night, as she often was, I stayed home with Tatiana, sitting too close to the television tuned to Food Network. Everything about the show was amazing.
The whole thing was so over-the-top, it was like catnip for a food-obsessed young boy. I followed the chefs as they moved with single-minded purpose under the bright lights of their kitchen stadium, heedless of the cameras shoved in their faces. They were so fearless, unhesitatingly wrenching octopuses from their tanks and twisting lobsters’ bodies in two. Then it was a fury of chopping and blending, sautéing and flambéing. These Japanese men (and they were all men) in their shiny clothing and tall hats were my Power Rangers, my personal superheroes.
Sometimes I got so inspired, I headed into the kitchen, pulling down from their high shelves my mothers’ pots, bowls, and sheet pans, grabbing from the pantry whatever ingredients I could find and from the refrigerator whatever I could reach. I imitated the techniques I saw on television, albeit with the skill of an eight-year-old. Not infrequently my mother came home late at night to a complete mess of a kitchen with me curled up asleep on the floor. To her credit, she never once yelled at me. She just scooped me up, dusted the flour from my clothes, and put me to bed.
In some circles there’s still a stigma attached to reality television, a belief that there are real chefs and TV chefs. The former climb up the ranks, unseen and unheard, in other people’s kitchens. They pay their dues slowly and come to fame after years of toil, if at all. The latter, on the other hand, find fame first and figure out the particulars afterward. There are risks to both approaches, but by 2013 reality TV was clearly one of the best ways to build a brand.
With the Shaw Bijou, I was planning to open the most ambitious restaurant D.C. had ever seen. Nonetheless, the highest position I had ever held in a restaurant was only as a line cook at EMP. I didn’t have a fancy knife roll, packed with hard carbon steel, to unfurl on set. By this time, I had precisely two knives: a chef’s knife and a tourné knife. The rest of my money back then went to rent. Now, if you know one thing about Top Chef you know the line delivered by Padma Lakshmi to the unlucky bastard being kicked off: “Pack your knives and go.” I had heard it a hundred times as a viewer but hoped I would never hear it as a contestant. If I did, however, I at least needed knives to pack. As a parting gift before I went off to California to start filming that June, Kelly, one of my partners at the Shaw Bijou, handed me a thick roll of bills. “That’s for you to get camera ready,” he said with a grin. It was like some scene out of Pretty Woman. I took the cash and went on a shopping spree at Korin, a high-end Japanese knife shop in Tribeca. A good knife can run more than a grand, so after I bought my set I had only a few hundred dollars left over. Such was the pitiable state of my savings that I used the last of the money to finally replace my glasses, which I had worn crooked for years.
I got eliminated on the thirteenth episode. The elimination challenge was to create a fast casual restaurant concept. The six of us were paired with six of the already eliminated contestants to act as our sous chefs. Marjorie Meek-Bradley, who won the Quickfire challenge, had earned the right to dictate the pairs. Since she saw me as a danger, she paired me with Philip Frankland Lee, who was as close to a villain as the season had. Philip and I didn’t get along. In fact, no one got along with him. You can see it on the show; it wasn’t clever editing. He was just a guy who refused to take responsibility for anything. But to be fair, it wasn’t his fault I went home. It was mine.
My restaurant concept was a bite-sized chicken-and-waffles stand called Waffle Me. The idea was that you could customize your waffle from whole wheat to coriander to sweet potato, customize the level of spiciness on the chicken from mild to fiery, and you could add your own condiments. I’d had thirteen episodes to find my gimmick; now it was time to cash in. We were all in the same boat: Jeremy, a dude, did Taco Dudes. Isaac played up his Creole roots and did a gumbo shop called Gumbo for Y’all; I, the only black contestant, did chicken-and-waffles. It crossed my mind, of course, that I might be playing into age-old stereotypes of black folks’ food. But fast-casual concepts have to be easy to grasp and delicious. There is nothing more comforting when done right than chicken and waffles. I was confident I’d walk away with the win.
Alas, I stumbled, fatally. Frozen waffles were my downfall. I get it now. I had two things to make, the chicken and the waffles. The chicken I nailed, but as all the judges said, the waffles were a problem. I had planned to do my own and had asked the producers to procure a waffle iron for the challenge. This was according to the rules, but they hadn’t gotten it until halfway through. By that time I had already made do with the frozen Eggo waffles I had bought as a contingency on our shopping run the day before. I knew it would be an issue, but I was hoping that griddling them with butter and ancho chili powder and adding a maple jus would be enough customization to compensate. I mean, maple jus, for Christ’s sake.
I knew I was in trouble at the judges’ table when Padma said, “I want to know how you made your waffles.” I waffled, naturally. I said I had griddled them in butter, but then, realizing that there was no way out, admitted I hadn’t made them; they were frozen. Tom Colicchio fixed me with his blue eyes, and I could feel his dismayed incredulity bearing down on me. Padma gave me one of her sad, disappointed looks. Adam Fleischman, the guest judge and founder of Umami Burger, did a double-take.
After the challenge segment ended, we all headed into the stew room, where contestants waited—fueled by ample booze—to learn our fates. I had a feeling I was going home, and I had plenty of time to rehearse what I wanted to say when Padma asked me to pack my knives. There were two things I wanted to be sure of. First, it was important to me to act with dignity in the last moments. Getting kicked off Top Chef is like a public execution. These were my last moments, the last image viewers might ever see of me, so I wanted to comport myself with grace. Second, I wanted to say something to Tom. I had never let on that I had worked at Craft, that I knew him from back in the day. That would be my final reveal.
In the end it was between Jeremy and his undercooked pork belly and me, with my premade waffles. I felt exactly as uncomfortable as I appeared on TV, shifting from foot to foot with no idea what to do with my face or where to look.
When at last Padma spoke the words I had dreaded for so long, I turned to Jeremy for a hug. I had seen enough eliminations to know the rituals expected of us. I approached the judges’ tables, said my piece to Tom, and headed out the door. And that was it. The bubble burst immediately and not without relief. After a brief exit interview, the mother of one of the PAs drove me to the elimination house.
Because there’s such a long gap between filming and airing, eliminated contestants are kept quarantined together in a house until the season finale is filmed. There was not much we could do but stew in a mixture of boredom and depression. During those blurry days and nights between elimination and the final, a week or so later, I thought a lot about what had happened. The show wouldn’t air for months, and I wondered how I would be presented. I wondered how it would change my life. Would I be a hero or a villain? A celebrity or a failure? In the meantime, I had a restaurant to open. Once filming ended, I returned to D.C., to try to figure out who I was as a chef without a camera in my face.