Tom Colicchio, Gail Simmons, Kristen Kish

Its playing field narrowed from 15 chefs to just six, Top Chef season 22 now migrates production from Toronto to Calgary. There’s sure to be some rodeo-related challenge, and, ideally, no risotto.

Bravo‘s coming June 12 finale of Destination Canada also marks the end of the second full season with Kristen Kish joining Tom Colicchio and Gail Simmons at the Judges’ Table, and as host, so it seemed like a good time to check in on the core trio. Over lunch during a recent promotional trip to Los Angeles, the stars of TV’s most revered and enduring cooking competition talked about everything from what they wish viewers saw more of and the season one altercation that had Tom steaming, to former colleague Padma Lakshmi‘s comically low tolerance to alcohol and keeping their Emmy-winning reality show at the top of its game — even if the term “reality show” still makes them bristle after almost 20 years.

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I’d like to discuss the almost pathological obsession with failing at risotto on this show. It happened again in the premiere. Twenty-two seasons in, why is this still happening?

KRISTEN KISH When you hear that no one’s done well it before, that no one has very made a successful risotto, something inside of you wants to be the first one to do it.

Did you attempt risotto?

KISH No, I’m not dumb.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever had a risotto that really knocked my socks off. Am I missing something?

GAIL SIMMONS There’s lots of great risotto out there. It’s not that it’s that difficult to make. It’s when you have no control over your circumstances, and you’re making an Americanized version of risotto, that there are just too many factors at play.

TOM COLICCHIO I don’t believe that American chefs are taught how to properly make risotto. There’s the saute of onions and adding broth, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, that’s all fine. You go to Italy and risotto is so damn al dente. If you made it like that in the states, people would send it back and say, “This isn’t cooked.” Because we’re cooking our rice through, it throws out way too much starch. It gets way too gummy and it’s not interesting at all. That’s my two cents.

SIMMONS They’re all deeply, deeply scarred. I don’t know why it became a thing.

COLICCHIO Because no one makes it right! (Laughter) When I was growing up, you’d see risotto so thick that you were able to put it in a ring mold and it would stand up. What fuck is that? I don’t want to eat that. In Italy, it’s almost runny. It’ll flatten out the plate. That’s what you’re looking for.

Have you had it the menu at any of your restaurants, Tom?

COLICCHIO Oh, for sure.

Risotto is not the only running joke at this point. What are some other traps that people continue to fall into over the seasons?

SIMMONS It’s the trends we see come through. We’re shooting this all consecutively, and these people are cooking together day after day. When we see someone use something specific, they can start thinking the same way and cooking the same way. All of a sudden, one chef uses a technique and then everyone’s using it. The croquettes, the leaf stencils, the silicone-molded skulls…

COLICCHIO I think there’s too much gaming where they try to figure out what we would like. If you make something you like, and it’s good, we’ll like it. We like it all.

SIMMONS You’re not going home because Tom doesn’t like okra.

COLICCHIO Never once has that happened.

Talk to me about the ingredients the chefs bring with them from home. They aren’t mentioned often, but this season we saw edible pine cones and… a bag of short grain white rice that I’m pretty sure they sell at Whole Foods.

COLICCHIO You’re allowed to bring 12 ingredients.

SIMMONS They all come with a box of their personal things, but that brings up a good point. We know it’s happening, but maybe it’s not always clear to the viewer when they’re used. It’s interesting that they choose what they choose, because some of these ingredients are ones we don’t see that often or we haven’t seen before — like with Anyya. I had never heard of these little edible pine cones.

COLICCHIO I’ve been trying for 10 seasons now to have the first episode to be a real mise en place challenge. You’d have 10 hours to make stuff for your own personal pantry — preserved lemons, roasted tomatoes, stocks, things like that. Then you’d get to use them throughout the season. And then if you lose, there’s a pantry raid and the winner of that challenge can actually take stuff out of your pantry. I think that’d be cool, because there are so many things that you can’t use in this kitchen because you don’t have time to make them while you’re here. So we’d walk around, we look at their mise en place cooking and how they work, and then send someone home. (Laughs.)

SIMMONS I’d like to see them all empty their boxes just to show us what they brought during the first Quickfire. We just want to know what’s in their personal arsenals. Wow, we’re really developing now.

That way you could potentially avert the whole “I never got to cook my food for them” line when someone goes home in the first few episodes.

KISH That’s a cop out answer!

SIMMONS If we wanted you to just cook your food the way you do it every night in your restaurant, we would just come to your restaurant. The whole point is we don’t want see people do the same thing every day.

COLICCHIO Also… you cooked your food. And it sent you home.

This is an observation, not a judgment, but were there more elimination challenges in the studio this season? I felt like I saw less of Toronto than I expected.

SIMMONS I don’t think it felt that way to us.

COLICCHIO It’s been the same amount of elimination challenges on the set as the season before.

SIMMONS We’re leaving Toronto. The last four episodes are out of the studio: Calgary and then the final location we’re still not allowed to talk about.

KISH We are are now honorary Calgarians. They did a whole ceremony and everything.

COLICCHIO We got giant white hats.

Gail, as our resident Canadian, what was on your local bucket list this season that you really wanted to see highlighted?

SIMMONS The one cliche that I do lean into is maple syrup. That’s deep part of my life. Other than that, I was really excited to highlight a lot of the indigenous cooking. We showed a little bit of it at the beginning and there’ll be more of it to come. I’m going to say this carefully, but I think, in Canada, the indigenous culture overall has been more widely acknowledged than in the states. It plays a larger role in food ways in Canada. There were fine dining indigenous restaurants there long before here. I think it’s taught in schools in a different way. I’m not saying that Canada is perfect, of course, but it just plays a larger role in the daily understanding of Canadian food. And it’s only recent. I’m talking about the last 20 years, of course. So, I’m glad that it played a role.

Not to get political, but this seems topical. The New York Times just had a piece about RFK’s push to remove petroleum-based dyes from American foods. The photo that ran with the story was of a bowl of Canadian Fruit Loops next to a bowl of American Fruit Loops. They look completely different with natural dyes. I realize that dye doesn’t really present itself in fine dining, but do you have any takes?

SIMMONS It’s tricky, because that’s maybe the one thing that I agree with that man about.

COLICCHIO They also haven’t done anything. It’s nonsense.

SIMMONS It’s nonsense, but we know what’s possible. Many, many other countries in the world [have removed dyes] without anyone noticing. The food does not taste any different.

COLICCHIO A lot of this stuff is going to get done on another level. For instance, they eliminated some of the dyes in school lunches in California. So all the companies that make food for school lunches, they’re not going to separate their production and produce for California and the rest of the country. So then, just naturally, we fade it out. Little by little, it will happen, but it’s going to take more than a proclamation. What’s interesting is that Republicans are the ones typically pushing back against this stuff.

SIMMONS Interestingly, growing up, there were always things that we couldn’t get in Canada that we would drive to Buffalo for.

COLICCHIO Guns? (Laughter)

SIMMONS That’s definitely one of them. But also Red Vines, and there’s clearly red dye in those. I found them so alluring. Now it’s the opposite. When I go back to Canada, I fill my suitcase with all the thing the snack foods in Canada that I can’t get here. And by the way, Fruit Loops are just as insane looking in Canada as they are in America.

There are so many cooking competitions now. There’s all of the Guy Fieri stuff. Martha Stewart and Jose Andres just launched one on NBC. Your former colleague Padma Lakshmi is bringing one to CBS. You’re producers, too. At the start of each season, how do you talk about keeping things fresh without veering too far from the mission statement?

COLICCHIO Early on in our history, we were always pushing back against Bravo. They were more focused on making a reality show than a culinary competition. By season six, when we won an Emmy for the most foodie episode we’d ever done — a bunch of French chefs sitting around talking about French food — that was the point where they realized the focus really is on the culinary arts. And if you look at the edit, we spent a lot less time on reality now. [The chefs] don’t even live together anymore.

SIMMONS That was a pandemic thing, but we kept it.

COLICCHIO That was something that was just kind of forced, and it created some bad behavior that a large part of our culture doesn’t want to see it anymore. Restaurant culture doesn’t want to see it anymore. But I think we’ve always tweaking the show. And not because of some show is coming on the air. It just happens organically.

SIMMONS We are not about amateurs. What we’ve realized is that that’s what the audience wants to see. It is such secret world, and I think that it has allowed our viewers to learn so much about the industry, the creative process. It’s given our viewers a language about food that they weren’t privy to before.

COLICCHIO I think there’s also a certain integrity that we have because we decide who stays and who goes. That’s it. The guest judge, but that’s it. I know of other shows where they choose the winner ahead of time and it’s engineered or there’s a discussion about, “Well, wouldn’t this person be great for story?” We don’t factor any of that. In fact, there were times where we’re like, “Shit, this person’s going home and they’re really good.”

KISH The fact that it’s not fucked with year after year, to try to find a catch or a hook, is why we get the chefs who apply. Because they know what filming this show for six weeks can do for the rest of their life. If it were some kitschy game, or if it felt a little too made-for-television, it wouldn’t have the integrity or the reputation that the chefs get to share in moving forward.

Hard turn here, but when do you recall being the most overserved with booze during an elimination challenge?

COLICCHIO Season two.

SIMMONS Just that whole season in general? (Laughter)

COLICCHIO I don’t do it anymore, because I am drinking a lot less these days, but I used to sip gin and tonic at Judges’ Table. And I didn’t drink gin until season one of Top Chef. There was this incident with that one chef, and this didn’t show up in the episode, but at one point we cut and someone from production came over and was patting me with makeup…

SIMMONS This is episode one, season one, by the way.

COLICCHIO And this one guy, Ken Lee, was like, “Hey, put some hair on his head while you’re at it!” What the fuck! Who is this dude? It got really tense, so I walked into the bar and I’m sitting at the bar and the guy offers me a gin and tonic. Then it just became a thing. But season two…

SIMMONS There was some drinking, but never to compromise the integrity of our decision making. (Laughter)

COLICCHIO And Padma? Half a glass of wine and she’s drunk.

SIMMONS We called her “Champagne Padma” for a reason. That was the best. It always made me so giggly. But I never really drank more than a glass of wine at the judges table — which used to be six hours. It’s way shorter and more efficient now. And also I feel like we’ve swapped our vices. Instead of alcohol, Kristen has introduced us to candy.

KISH That’s what I bring to the table, gummy candy from whatever location we’re filming.

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Top Chef season 22 releases new episodes Thursdays at 9 p.m. ET on Bravo, streaming next day on Peacock.