San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
THE TEEN PRODIGY FROM OAKLAND
How the ‘Top Chef Junior’ finalist is making a name for herself.
Rahanna Bisseret Martinez is a Bay Area chef to watch. She’s spent time in some of the region’s top Michelinstarred restaurants, including Californios and Mister Jiu’s in San Francisco, and cooked at the esteemed James Beard House in New York. Celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse invited her to cook at his New Orleans restaurants, and during the same trip, she found her way into James Beard Awardwinning chef Nina Compton’s Compère Lapin. In London, she learned the ways of modern West African flavors at finedining spot Ikoyi. She’s already competed on two episodes of the Food Network show “Guy’s Grocery Games” and won one.
And the Oakland native did it all before turning 16 earlier this month.
Rahanna can’t even remember when she started cooking at home with her mom. But before too long, she stopped following her mom and took the lead. She never took cooking classes. Instead, she watched food shows, flipped through cookbooks and researched online while slowly amassing a collection of culinary tools, including a stand mixer, pasta roller and piping tips. Her grandma recently gifted her a new knife roll to much delight.
Like many food lovers, she watched “Top Chef,” Bravo’s highintensity culinary competition show that’s spawned the careers of bigname chefs like Carla Hall, Richard Blais and Stephanie Izard. When word of a spinoff for kids arrived, she didn’t have much interest in being on television, but the idea of cooking challenges sounded like fun. (She also has a competitive streak.)
“Top Chef Junior” featured speedy cooking challenges and celebrity judges just like the original, only the contestants were 11 to 14 years old and far less dramatic. Rahanna made it on the show at age 13 and she lasted to the finale, finishing a close second, impressing judges with a technically precise fried quail with pickled quail eggs.
“I thought I was just going to be put on the competition show and then leave and there’d be nothing else,” she said. She was wrong.
The opportunities kept coming, and Rahanna took full advantage. She has completed more than 20 stages — the restaurant industry term for internships — in addition to cooking for special events, teaching cooking classes and speaking on panels. Usually, she cold emails the chefs. Usually, they say yes, though it could take her a while to resume staging now that the coronavirus has sent the restaurant industry into disarray.
Rahanna has managed to juggle so much — not to mention tennis and making pizza from scratch with friends — thanks to her homeschooling. Her mom, Mona Bisseret Martinez, built a culinary arts section into her curriculum so Rahanna can spend school time reading cookbooks or baking focaccia. When not staging at a restaurant, she usually cooks for about two hours a day.
The flexibility also means she can peel potatoes in a restaurant kitchen in the morning and then resume her classes in the afternoon. One morning, she woke up at 4:30
to finish writing an essay before she could go to a restaurant to prep ingredients.
“I was proud of myself: I got my paper done and I got to do this,” she said.
While on “Top Chef Junior,” Rahanna already exhibited confidence and maturity in the kitchen as well as a distinct culinary point of view. She loves cooking California cuisine, highlighting produce from the farmers’ market, as well as dishes inspired by her roots in Mexico and Louisiana. Perhaps the best example on the show was her Southerninflected pecansweet potato pie with thyme ice cream and cajeta, the Mexican goat milk caramel. “Top Chef Junior” judge Gail Simmons, who is also a judge on “Top Chef,” called it “totally unique.”
Rahanna’s cooking style hasn’t changed much since the show, she said, but the way she approaches cooking has become influenced by restaurant kitchens. She spends more time thinking through logistics and timing, preparing components ahead of time and slowly building up to the final plate. It follows one of her favorite aspects of staging: seeing how ingredients prepped early in the day eventually find their way to a masterful dish.
At San Francisco’s tiny eightseat finedining restaurant Merchant Roots, Rahanna helped chefowner Ryan Shelton char pearl onion petals, poach pears and even explain dishes to diners. Shelton had never received interest in a stage from someone so young, and he was blown away by her sense of urgency on the line.
“You’d think she was working in professional kitchens for a decade,” he said. “All of her body language was right.”
At two different stages at San Francisco Chinese restaurant Mister Jiu’s, Rahanna completed basic tasks such as prepping ginger and scallions but also trussing ducks and wrapping wontons.
“She’s very professional, very curious, really helpful, constantly going around the kitchen asking what we need help with,” said Mister Jiu’s pastry chef Melissa Chou. “There’s a lot of initiative.”
Rahanna lights up when she talks about her time in restaurants and the chefs who invite her. In her eyes, they’re determined, hardworking and so nice.
“When I was younger, I’d see things about how like chefs are angry and mad,” she said. “I don't know if that’s still true.”
She observed cooks consistently working together as a team in the grand pursuit of hospitality. She’s developed an appreciation for this ideal, plus the vitality of a wellorganized kitchen.
She hopes the positive kitchen environments she has witnessed are becoming the standard. She also hopes fine dining restaurants continue to become more inclusive.
“In kitchens, there are women and people of color. They definitely have opportunity,” she said, based off of her stages. “There still isn’t a large amount, but I see it’s growing and that’s something that really excites me.”
For her 16th birthday, Rahanna scored dinner reservations at Taco Maria, a Michelinstarred Mexican restaurant in Orange County, and spent the day cooking a family meal for staff at Gwen, a tasting menuonly spot in Los Angeles. The menu was jalapeño shrimp and grits with pickled chard stems; salad with charred orange dressing, fried sunchoke chips and anchomaple sunflower seeds; and sparkling peach aguas frescas.
She’s looking forward to learning to drive like other 16yearolds, but she’s more excited to start applying for restaurant gigs. California labor law heavily restricts the type of kitchen work and number of hours a high school student can work — but much of that gets easier at age 16.
Rahanna dreams of staging at one of Dominique Crenn’s kitchens and then getting a job at a fine dining restaurant to give her two solid years of cooking experience before going to college. She still wants the fouryear university experience, and she wants to explore other potential culinary careers such as food styling or hosting a food podcast before committing to the kitchen.
Her openness might be wise. While celebrity chef culture and food television shows are ushering in a young generation fascinated with restaurants, the life of a chef isn’t easy. Hours are long. Pay is often low.
“It can be a very challenging career in a way that’s not necessarily obvious when you’re young and excited,” Chou said.
Still, food remains at the top of Rahanna’s mind even as she considers college applications.
“I’m not sure if I want to stay in California or go somewhere else,” Rahanna said. “There are a lot of good restaurants here but also everywhere else in the world.”