Last time we checked, Ina Garten wasn’t being hauled around the country in a trailer to emerge periodically and whip up brunch for her fans, but for four years now, Bravo’s Top Chef has pretty much done just that with its stars. The TV show, which just wrapped up its eighth season, sends a custom kitchen-trailer on a 20-city tour each spring, and former “cheftestants” compete anew, sharing delicacies with local-celeb judges, including Sauce editor Katie O’Connor, and audience members alike.
Top Chef: The Tour, sponsored by Charter and L’École Culinaire, begins right here in St. Louis at Soulard Market, this Friday, April 15, with live interactive shows at 10:30 a.m., noon and 1:30 p.m. The 2011 tour features Nikki Cascone, who made it through nine episodes of season four, and Hector Santiago, who lasted four episodes in season six. Santiago, a Latin-cuisine specialist who hails from Puerto Rico and owns Atlanta’s Pura Vida Tapas & Bar, is once again ready to rumble – and to dish the dirt from behind the scenes at Top Chef.
Are you excited about competing in Top Chef: The Tour? Yes, this will be kind of different from the competition on TV. Instead, it will just be me and Nikki. I’m curious to see who will win.
Will there be mystery ingredients for the challenges? Yes, but we also get to bring one mystery ingredient ourselves. We have to figure things out on the fly, and we have 15 minutes to cook. Fifteen minutes is not a lot of time to make ribs, for instance, so I will have to go to Pappy’s for my ribs later. (Laughs)
How much pressure did you feel on Top Chef? Quite a bit, having a camera almost on top of you changes things. We were always in a hurry, but we had to take a little time to make stuff look good, too. Once you’re in the groove, you tend to forget the camera, but you never forget the clock – you have nightmares about it.
And with each new episode, more pressure … Yes, and it can be difficult to read the judges: Will they like this? Will they like that? A lot of people still wonder if it’s for real. And it is. The clock is real. One thing that’s fun about the tour is that we are just saying, “Let’s go for it, let’s have fun and have fun with the guests.”
What about the temptations of filming in Las Vegas, where season six was taped? They put us in a great house overlooking Las Vegas. We were sitting there every night looking out the window, thinking, “It looks great, but it’s so far away.” I had not been to Vegas before. I got to have fun there, and go to some great kitchens there. It’s not like in New York; there are no space restrictions. It’s our biggest dream as chefs to have huge kitchens like the ones we got to see.
What might you have done differently on Top Chef? I feel where I missed my mark was in cooking my food, and forgetting what was going on around me. Sometimes I would have someone amazing next to me, and dominating, like Kevin Gillespie [of Woodfire Grill in Atlanta]. I should have looked around me more to make sure I was making something as amazing as he was.
How has Top Chef advanced your career? People come by my restaurant because they saw me on the show. People don’t care if you lost or how you lost, just that you were there on the show. When I left the show, I thought I was screwed, I wanted to grow a beard and hide so nobody would harass me. (Laughs) Two weeks after I lost, I was in New York at a conference, and my last episode was airing. Everybody there was so supportive of me.
There’s always drama on Top Chef – who bothered you on the show? There’s a lot of drama, and it was a concern going in, to avoid it as much as possible. That not how I am. What you see is what you get with me. Me and Mike Isabella had a little disagreement behind the cameras, but it didn’t escalate, we came to an agreement. To be in this business, most of the time you are a little crazy, and you put all those people together, it’s like putting a lot of peppers in a pot and not expecting it to be hot. (Laughs) And it was fun – if everyone had the same personality, it would be boring. Chopped is so boring. You need a little bit of action. But at the end of the day, we wind up cooking together, we have common ground.
How do you incorporate the cuisine of your native Puerto Rico into your food? For me it’s not just Puerto Rican food, but Latin American food. I try to use a lot of ingredients from a bunch of Latin countries. At the end of the day, my major base of cooking is sofrito – the mix of sautéed onions, pepper and garlic, and the versions of that all over Latin America, and the world, really. It’s just like the mirepoix [sautéed onions, carrots, and celery] at the center of French cooking. I like to keep it very non-denominational. We have so much common ground. That’s what I hope to do back in Puerto Rico someday, to introduce some other concepts there, too.
What’s an ingredient you’re enjoying using now? Peppers, still. Peppers are the big thing at my restaurant, and it’s not just about heat. It’s about controlling the heat with different techniques, and delivering great flavor without burning the hell out of you. I do have some sauces that will practically burn your ears when you eat them, but it’s about control and balance. I want people to say, “That was so delicious that I want to eat another one.”
They call you “The Chile Whisperer.” They used to, yeah. We’re using ghost peppers in the summer now. We have a local producer who grows them. They’re dangerously fun. We are making a ketchup with them. We dehydrate the pepper in sugar and vinegar, and we do a burger called the Fire Burger. When you eat it, your ears sweat and tingle. People love it. We eat them here at the staff meal every Friday.
How do you like that Top Chef: The Tour kitchen truck? We use it all over, and it’s well equipped. I want to take it with me and run a business out of it. I had a burrito stand, and people loved it, but it got shut down, so maybe I need to get a truck now.
People actually get to taste your food at the tour stops. That’s what we want to do when we watch the TV show. Whatever we make up there, you get to try it. They haven’t made a TV that can do that yet. [Laughs]
This article appears in April 2011.