Colicchio and ‘Top Chef’ find a new Kentucky home in Season 16
Say “Kentucky” to most people and you’ll likely conjure mental images of horse races and bottles of fine whiskey.
And both come into play as Bravo’s “Top Chef ” heads to the Bluegrass State for its 16th season, which gets underway Thursday. Dec. 6, as 15 chefs from across the country compete for the title amid the unique culinary scenes of Louisville, Lexington and Lake Cumberland before heading to Macao, China, for the final showdown.
Along the way, judges Tom Colicchio, Graham Elliot, Nilou Motamed and Gail Simmons and host Padma Lakshmi got to take in the 2018 Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs, watch the contestants cook for Laila Ali at the Muhammad Ali Center, oversee a buzzer beater showdown at Rupp Arena with University of Kentucky basketball coach Jon Calipari and visit the Maker’s Mark bourbon distillery.
“Kentucky was fun, actually,” Colicchio, the head judge, reports. “I hadn’t spent much time there, so it was good to see that part of the country. You know, we were there for the Derby, which was a lot of fun. It was something I always wanted to do and never had an opportunity to get to, so that was a lot of fun . ... Some of the local foods and stuff really came into play nicely. Obviously, bourbon does and so it was a good couple of weeks I spent there.”
In fact, one of the highlights of the MayJune filming for Colicchio was overseeing a competition at the Maker’s Mark distillery in the tiny town of Loretto.
“It’s really an amazing operation ...,” Colicchio says. “They’re producing a lot of bourbon but really high-quality bourbon ... it’s quite an operation. And we did shoot there. We had just a great day there. It was, from what I recall, a beautiful sunny day and we were kind of in between the distillery and a few rickhouses and the setting was really great. That was fun.”
And, of course, there was the Kentucky cuisine, of which the contestants were tasked with coming up with their own interpretations. One was a very popular dish known as burgoo, which is a spicy stew made from game meat.
“For the most part, we were using local ingredients,” Colicchio explains. “We used some local beef that was really good. There’s things like local soy sauce that’s being produced that’s really, really good. So we did use some local products as well.
“But I think what happens with the chefs is that they know they’re going to Kentucky, they start studying, they started doing some homework, and then I think they also leaned heavily on a contestant that was from Kentucky just to sort of understand the culture a little better.”