Want More 'Top Chef' in Your Life? Try Dining at Contestants' Restaurants (2024)

Since its 2006 debut, Top Chef has turned Tom Colicchio, Padma Lakshmi, and former Food & Wine special projects director Gail Simmons into food celebrities and created a wave of household-name cheftestants-turned-restaurateurs. Here are a few places Top Chef fans can get more of their favorites off the screen and onto their plate.

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Tatiana (New York City)

Since his originalTop Chef: California stint in 2016, Kwame Onwuachi has amassed all manner of accolades, from being named a 2019 F&W Best New Chef to nabbing a Rising Star James Beard Award later that year. But sweetest perhaps is the top placement on The New York Times' 100 Best Restaurants in New York list in April, 2023 for his restaurant Tatiana. The glam, soaring Lincoln Center spot is a love letter to Onwuachi's New York City upbringing, featuring playful, elegant homages to bodega staples, late-night eats, and neighborhood favorites across the full, vibrant palette of NYC's culinary diversity.

16 Recipes from Chef Kwame Onwuachi to Make Again and Again

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Girl & the Goat (Chicago and Los Angeles)

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Top Chef: Chicago victor Stephanie Izard kept in touch with fans via a blog, an enthusiastic Twitter account, and behind-the-scenes videos before opening Chicago’s Girl & the Goat in 2010 and earning her spot as a 2011 F&W Best New Chef. Izard emphasizes a bold mix of Mediterranean and Southeast Asian flavors in dishes like grilled octopus with guanciale and pistachio-lemon vinaigrette, and wood-oven-roasted pig’s face with tamarind and red wine–maple sauce. In 2021, she opened an L.A. outpost of the restaurant. Izard now helms three more Chicago establishments: the "inspired Chinese" Duck Duck Goat; Cabra; a Peruvian-inspired rooftop restaurant (also with a Los Angeles location); and Little Goat diner.

9 Delicious Grilling Recipes from Chef Stephanie Izard

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Sweet Cheeks Q (Boston)

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A finalist on the first season of Top Chef and on All-Stars, Tiffani Faison cooks her way through an impressive 1,500 pounds of meat a month for this Texas-style barbecue joint, working with sustainably raised Angus beef and Berkshire pork. (Faison is particularly proud of the pork belly, which she cures, brines, and smokes to achieve a meatier and less fatty texture.) Located near Fenway Park, Sweet Cheeks also has an expansive whiskey list and an outdoor beer garden. Faison's Big Heart Hospitality Group runs several other area restaurants as well: adult snack bar Fool's Errand, upscale Italian-American spot Orfano, Tenderoni's old-school pizza joint, Dive Bar raw bar, and the Champagne bar Bubble Bath.

38 'Top Chef' Recipes to Add to Your Rotation

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610 Magnolia (Louisville)

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Top Chef: Texas fan favorite Edward Lee opened 610 Magnolia inside a charming carriage house in the center of Old Louisville, offering a six-course prix fixe menu that focuses on modern, market-driven Southern cuisine, like a recent specials of duck breast, dirty Carolina Gold rice, napa cabbage, plum hoisin sauce, and charred okra or chanterelle hummus, trout roe, cucumber, pickled ramp, heirloom tomato hearts, and eggplant paper. Two outposts of Lee's Washington, D.C. restaurant, Succotash Prime, highlight his trademark soulful Southern-meets-Korean style.

Good Eggs: The People Helping Restaurants the Most During COVID-19

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Good Stuff Eatery (Washington, D.C.)

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Spike Mendelsohn’s Capitol Hill restaurant Good Stuff Eatery gets its name from the words his restaurateur grandfather used to say when biting into a cheeseburger. The former Top Chef: Chicago contestant also borrowed a few other tips: “We wrap our burgers in wax paper, just like my grandfather did.” Besides classic burgers, the restaurant specializes in herb-tossed fries and toasted marshmallow milkshakes. It has seven locations, including one in Egypt.

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Fox & the Knife (Boston)

Food & Wine named Top Chef: California contestant Karen Akunowicz's Fox & the Knife as one of 2019's Best New Restaurants because as restaurant editor Jordana Rothman wrote, "Akunowicz was already a star — a Top Chef contestant and a 2018 James Beard Award winner for her work at Myers + Chang — when she opened Fox & the Knife, but the South Boston spot is her first solo effort. That those tigelle are a specialty from Emilia-Romagna should tell you the mood she's after here, but Akunowicz mostly has a light touch around regionality. Her wild-boar Bolognese is sticky perfection with its rumble of herbs and Parmesan, and her mafaldini are heavy with salty guanciale. But then there's that panzanella salad packed with sumac and pomegranate, and that Caesar with spears of grilled broccoli subbed in for romaine, and that round of hot focaccia split at its equator and packed with oozing Taleggio."

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Catch (Wilmington, North Carolina)

Want More 'Top Chef' in Your Life? Try Dining at Contestants' Restaurants (5)

At Catch, Top Chef: Texas competitor Keith Rhodes uses Port City markets’ seafood and demonstrates a reverence for vegetables, something he acquired during his childhood. “My mother was a Seventh-day Adventist,” says the chef. “Growing up we practiced a vegetarian diet, so the organic, natural lifestyle is a lot of my soul.” His North Carolina Sweet Potato Salad is an ode to those ideals, combining diced sweet potatoes with shelled hemp seeds, local goat cheese, baby spinach, and strawberries or macerated cranberries, depending on the season.

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Suzy Wong's House of Yum (Nashville)

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Arnold Myint, a contestant on Top Chef: Washington D.C., has made a name for himself in Nashville with his bold approach to Asian-fusion cuisine. At Suzy Wong’s House of Yum, Asian classics are transformed into comfort foods like strawberry cream cheese egg rolls and katsu chicken and waffles, and can be enjoyed during the restaurant's Drag'N Brunch shows each weekend. Additionally, Myint serves up modern Thai at International Market, the restaurant he and his sister run in the legacy of their late mother, who was the eatery's original owner.

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Gunshow (Atlanta)

Want More 'Top Chef' in Your Life? Try Dining at Contestants' Restaurants (7)

After running the kitchen at Atlanta institution Woodfire Grill for four years, Top Chef: Las Vegas finalist Kevin Gillespie moved on to his next project, Gunshow, named in homage to his favorite childhood pastime. Opened in 2013, Gunshow has a more free-form style of service, with no set menu and a format that recalls traditional dim sum. Gillespie sends his rustic, Southern-inspired dishes out to the dining room, letting guests choose items as they come out. “If you want it, you take it; if you don’t want it, that's fine, too,” explains Gillespie. “You're the one in charge of your experience.”

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Kann (Portland, Oregon)

Top Chef: Boston contestant Gregory Gourdet was seeking a space to open his wood-fired ode to Haitian cuisine when the COVID-19 pandemic struck. That dream had to smolder for a while, but shortly after opening in the summer of 2022, Kann amassed stacks of awards including Esquire's Restaurant of the Year with its soup joumou, peanut creamed greens, pikliz, and other can't-miss dishes.

Gregory Gourdet Wants America to Respect Haitian Food

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Toups' Meatery (New Orleans)

On the Top Chef: California season, the Rayne, Louisiana "born and braised" Isaac Toups picked up the fan favorite prize and never wavered from his roots in Cajun cuisine. Nab a table at his eponymous NOLA restaurant and you'll quickly understand why both those things came to pass. Yes of course the meaty stuff lives up to the top-line billing, but don't sleep on the couvillion made with Louisiana Gulf fish, crab, and crab fat rice, some roasted Gulf shrimp with sherry, garlic, olive oil, eggplant, and bread, or a daily "chef's lunch" of boudin, a burger, and a beer. (It comes with a free side of afternoon napping.)

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Playa Provisions (Playa del Rey, California)

Choose your own eating adventure at Brooke Williamson's Playa Provisions. Along with her husband Nick Roberts, the Top Chef: Charleston winner operates four distinct experiences — King Beach (casual coffee, sandwiches, salads, grab-and-go co*cktails), the seafood-centric Dockside, Small Batch Ice Cream Bar, and Grain Whiskey Bar — all in one 7,000-foot beachside location.