A chance meeting with a Top Chef

Ordinarily I don’t much care for celebrity stuff and the only reality television that I watch are cooking shows and competitions. I didn’t even know what a Lady Gaga was until recently and other than the lessons a father can glean from Tiger Wood’s situation I truly could care less because it doesn’t impact my life.

However, at the end of September when I was out in California for the Nestle Family event I had the opportunity to meet Chef Michael Voltaggio, the winner of Top Chef season six. Over the previous five seasons Top Chef has established itself as a top notch competition for up and coming chefs, especially given the recent string of highly regarded guest judges from around the culinary world.

Chef Voltaggio is Chef de Cuisine at the Michelin starred ‘The Dining Room’ at the Langham Huntington Hotel in Pasadena where we were staying. The staff there arranged for all of us at the event to go to the kitchen and meet him, which was a brief, but fun time given my interest in culinary exploits.

Even though it was relatively early in the season when I met him, Chef Voltaggio had started to separate himself from the group and the finals predictably came down to a three way run off between his brother Bryan, Kevin Gillespie and him. As the competition went on I was excited that Michael might win it all, but part of me was also rooting for Kevin (who ultimately won fan favorite), since many of his dishes were things I’d like to attempt making myself.

As we were leaving, Chef Voltaggio extended an offer for us to visit the kitchen any time if we wanted to get a behind the scenes look at things. Believe me when I say I was extremely tempted to skip out on dinner the next night, grab some chef’s white and a santoku and see if I could pass muster as one of his sous chefs. Realistically, though, I am probably only suited to be the dishwasher in a kitchen of that caliber.

Part of me regrets at least not going back to chat with him privately after hours, but he’s a busy guy with a kitchen to run. Besides, what was I going to tell him, that I’m some guy with a blog about being a dad that occasionally takes pictures of the food me makes? What I can do in the kitchen he can do in his sleep and it will probably look more composed.

And although I didn’t get a chance to eat at The Dining Room while I was there to sample his creations, I will most certainly be giving one of his Top Chef dishes a try here in the near future. For his elimination challenge in the tenth episode, Michael prepared an asparagus salad and Japanese tomato sashimi with banana polenta for his appetizer.

Since that episode I’ve been intrigued by the idea of replicating the banana polenta with some sort of fish, I just need to figure it all out. You’ll probably read about it soon enough