Original judge, new host share tidbits amid show filming
Dinner invitation opens up world of ‘Top Chef’
Arotund Midwestern summer sun was beating down on a groups of welldressed strangers as we waited to be corralled into a mystery location. Despite the promise of an upscale setting, we were standing in an open-air parking lot in Madison, Wisconsin, lining up to sign paperwork and surrender our phones to ensure confidentiality. We were there to get a sneak peek behind the culinary competition “Top Chef” as it heads into Season 21 with a new crop of contestants, a new host and a mid-America location. Magical Elves Productions, the company behind “Top Chef,” decided to split filming time between Madison and Milwaukee this season.
A few weeks earlier, I’d been contacted with the tantalizing offer to be a background diner in an episode. Details were sparse, which is how I found myself in this holding pen that, after a cursory glance around, was nowhere near a restaurant. My new stranger-friends seemed equally baffled.
Soon everyone had paperwork settled, shuffled and signed. We were ushered across four lanes of traffic, midblock by people radioing back-and-forth with the set crew. It wasn’t long before we were murmuring culinary assessments to be cut and spliced into an episode where one chef would be crowned the winner and another sent to pack their knives.
This was TV magic in the making. The rhythm of the episodes is familiar to fans: Someone will likely flub risotto, and the clock is going to catch up to one of the chefs and they’ll miss ingredients on the plate. Personalities will emerge and names unknown right now will become familiar in the famous-chef circuit.
After filming this episode, new host Kristen Kish, who has worked her way from being a participant to guest judge to now holding down the job made famous by Padma Lakshmi, sat down to talk about her new position.
There are a lot of eyes on Kish as she assumes “Top Chef” hosting duties, but the gaze wasn’t stressing her out.
“The thing I love about all of my jobs is that they’re vastly different, so I get to delve into different parts of myself. On ‘Fast Foodies,’ I’m a chef — there’s no makeup and that’s really fun. ‘Iron Chef’ was very polished. ‘The End of the World’ for Nat Geo was outdoorsy — lots of mosquitoes,” she said. “‘Top Chef’ was very much a homecoming.”
The way Kish speaks of “Top Chef” mirrors how others might talk about grad school or other formative, educational experiences. “It’s iconic in a lot of ways — it’s also responsible.”
The show’s responsibility that Kish appreciates is due to chef Tom Colicchio, who has been a “Top Chef” judge since its 2006 debut. “He would give the chefs feedback like he would the cooks in his kitchen,” Kish said. “All the critiques come from a place of wanting the chefs to be better — not just to retain viewers. Those dramatics just happen to follow.”
Back on set, we are shuffled through a side patio of the restaurant into a room brimming with production equipment and people in headsets intensely watching monitors. Directors are feeding instructions to those who are with the chefs in another room. The restaurant crackles with energy as the contestants cook and we background eaters shuffle in.
A competing chef is heard from the other room and the monitor yelling “Time?”
Eaters are corralled into a hushed dining room setting and seated; we mutter excitedly to our seatmates. There’s a rumor that the flowers on the table are bugged and that’s how they’ll hear our reactions to the food. Eyeing the centerpiece, I’m pretty sure it’s just a grocery store mum.
Suddenly, we’re called to attention and given the heads-up that the chefs are ready and the food is coming. They stand at the front, but we can’t hear everything that’s being said. It’s for the benefit of the camera and the judges’ table, which is in another room. The first round of food comes, and we all do our best to eat intelligently, delivering hopeful bon mots to the mums and each other like this is all totally normal.
We chat with the table next to us between courses; it turns out they’re family of the people who run the venue where this episode is being filmed. They were bursting with pride over the spotlight the show is bringing to the local dining scene.
Other diners are media, influencers and hospitality folk. Cameras swirl the room, stopping to focus intently on tables with great lighting — not mine. There was a lot of food to sample.
“I have to fast the day after filming,” Colicchio said after production had wrapped for the day. “I have 20 different things, I have to take a day off.” He laughs. “I can’t eat like that anymore.”
It’s not just his capacity to handle eating four consecutive tasting menus in one day, but he’s also experienced firsthand major shifts in the culinary world. “When I was at Gramercy (Tavern) I’d get in at 10 in the morning and not leave until 12 o’clock at night — and that was fine.” At that time, the hard driving never ended for many chefs.
Colicchio has a unique perspective on the industry as a restaurant owner and someone with a front-row seat to how “Top Chef” can change a person’s career and life trajectory. “When I took my first chef job, I was the first one in and the last one out and yeah, it was too much. It’s totally crazy hours and that’s not good for a lot of reasons, but you know you also have to work hard. It’s a profession.”
Even with his long workdays, the chef said, he still found moments to enjoy the area where they were filming. Between shooting days he’d found his way to the farmers market and gotten a proper Wisconsin brandy old fashioned at the Tornado Room. His review: “I’m more of a Manhattan guy.”
After wrapping, I was ready for some kind of celebratory cocktail, but this wasn’t the place. The set dissipated as diners roamed off after a rich midday, multicourse dining experience without climax.
On my way out I could see Kish on the monitor delivering her line: “So, tell us what you’ve prepared for us tonight.” A faceless chef described a dish and gave context we wouldn’t get with our bites. It was all part of the big show, and to find out what happens next, we’ll have to tune in.
Season 21 is now airing Wednesdays on Bravo and streaming the next day on Peacock. This season’s episodes will be supersized at 75 minutes. There are also two digital companion series. “The Dish With Kish” and “Top Chef: Last Chance Kitchen” will stream on bravotv.com.
For singer-songwriter Mitch Rowland, the day in 2016 that everything changed started like any other: Get up in the morning at the house he shared in Los Angeles, then head down the hill to Town Pizza for another day of dishwashing.
Then his roommate Ryan Nasci called from a recording session he was at with Harry Styles, who had not yet made his solo debut. Could Rowland get there ASAP to replace a guitarist who hadn’t shown up?
“Somebody said, ‘One, we don’t have a guitar player now,’ and ‘Two, we have nothing to lose by calling Mitch,’ ” Rowland says of the informal way that fate reached out to tap him on the shoulder that day. “So I got my shift covered for the day, went in, and sparks flew.
“We all got on, and the rest is kind of history,” he says. “But it wasn’t supposed to happen. Like a lot of things.”
Rowland laughs thinking back to that day eight years ago. It came three years after he had moved from Ohio to Los Angeles with his college friend Nasci. He’d had a vague notion of getting into the music business, only to end up working in the back of a pizza parlor.
That one unexpected day with Styles in producer Jonathan Bhasker’s pool house studio led to co-writing credits on nine of the 10 songs on Styles’ 2017 self-titled debut album. It also led to an ongoing role as Styles’ lead guitarist on all of his solo tours, as well as on Styles’ 2019 album “Fine Line” and 2022 album “Harry’s
House.” When “Harry’s House” won the 2023 Grammy for best album, Rowland took one home for his contributions to that record.
But now, with Styles between albums and tours, Rowland is stepping up to the front of the stage from his usual place behind his superstar friend and collaborator. “Come June,” his solo debut album, arrived in the fall. His first solo tour kicked off recently.
“You know, when that comes up, I have to say I couldn’t make it happen again,” Rowland says of the way it all began. “It was just too random. And I happened to be prepared, as should everybody, when opportunity sneaks up on you.
“But, oh man, it’s terrifying when I think about the chain of events that happened.”
Rowland started work on his solo debut in 2019, though at the time it was just one song, “Come June.” He says he almost didn’t include it on the record that shares the title at all, though.
“I kind of discarded it when I started (the album),” he says. “I decided, ‘OK, I’m going to make more of like a folk record, and “Come June,” by no means, fit onto that track listing.’
“Then towards the end ... I reapproached the old recording, and I made it fit in the end. So it was the first song written, last song to be recorded.”
The indie folk nature of the record is clear from the moment the needle drops. The mostly mid-tempo songs emphasize Rowland’s guitar and gentle vocals. There’s a similar ’70s feel shared with many of Styles’ songs, though here the vibe is softer, hushed, peaceful.
“I’ve always gravitated towards finger pickers,” Rowland says of his main guitar style on the album. “I guess when it boils down to what excites me the most, I think a lot of British folk makes my ears perk up the most. I saw Bert Jansch open for Neil Young on the Le Noise tour (in 2010),” he says. “I was probably 20 at the time and I was equally blown away and kind of confused. I knew this was having a large effect on me, but I kind of filed him away, Bert. I just wasn’t ready.”
A decade later, thumbing through albums in a London record shop, he came across Jansch again and dove in.
“I think ‘Rosemary Lane’ was the first record I brought home,” Rowland says. “The needle lifted — I listened to the whole thing — and it was only at that point I realized it was just guitar and vocals the whole time. No overdubs or anything, almost as minimal as you can get. Just one instrument and he kind of creates a band around the way he plays.”
Rowland continued to work on the album in fits and starts after 2019. The pandemic gave him time to write. When Styles went back on the road in 2021 to promote “Harry’s House,” Rowland wrote during breaks while in Pasadena or the English countryside where he lives with drummer Sarah Jones, whom he met when she joined Styles’ band, and their son, who turns 3 in March.
It was Jones who suggested he ask producer Rob Schnapf to work with him in the studio, Rowland says.
“To be honest, I feel like I’m the last person to find out about Rob,” he says of Schnapf, whose credits include co-producing Beck’s “Loser” and “Mellow Gold,” four albums by the late Elliott Smith, and records by artists such as Richard Thompson, Guided by Voices and Kurt Vile.
Schnapf also played on “Come June,” and agreed to join Rowland’s band for the tour.
“So Sarah’s on drums, Rob’s on guitar,” Rowland says. “I’ve hijacked like Rob’s whole life. I roped his wife into tour managing. Matt (Schuessler), who engineers for Rob, he’s gonna play bass. He played upright bass on most of the record. Then the last guy I hijacked was Rob’s intern, who’s going to be more of like a utility guy on Mellotron and some guitar and vocals.
“So yeah, I stole everyone while I was in there.”
Rowland made the live debut of his songs in May 2023 at the Slane Festival at Slane Castle in Ireland.
“Yeah, definitely if you want to talk about nerves,” he says. “That was our first show. Sarah and I were still on tour with Harry (who headlined Slane). He asked me if I wanted to do it — and how do you say no?
“So first, I said yes, and then second, I had to quickly figure it out,” Rowland says. “I can’t just sit and play a guitar by myself to 80,000 people. That’s nuts. So I didn’t do that. That’s kind of how Rob and Matt came. It forced us, or forced them, to decide if they wanted to play in this band and continue doing it.”
Rowland and his band played a record release show at the Troubadour in West Hollywood, California, in October, and a second showcase in Philadelphia a week later. And that’s it, until this tour.
“I, for the most part, would only go see shows in venues like this growing up,” Rowland says of the size of theaters his tour will hit. “So I think there’s going to be sort of a comfort level baked into being on the stage this time instead of in the audience. That’s a very familiar space to me. Much more so than the bigger places we have been playing (with Styles) for a while.”