TOP CHEF’S KRISTEN KISH DISHESTOP CHEF’S KRISTEN KISH DISHES

IN 2013, KRISTEN KISH won Bravo’s Top Chef and, shortly thereafter, became itinerant. She stopped working six-day weeks in Boston restaurant kitchens. She got a storage unit and stowed most of her things, rolled up some clothes and started living out of a backpack while launching a highly mobile food-media career.

In a way, she was living the dream.

“I’ve always had this nomadic sense of living,” the now-40-year-old chef says. “I never really wanted to feel like I lived anywhere—and that was the goal for quite some time.”

Kish has since compiled a TV résumé that includes hosting stints on the Travel Channel’s 36 Hours (an adaptation of the popular New York Times travel column), two seasons of TruTV’s junk-food homage Fast Foodies, and Netflix’s Iron Chef reboot. Last spring, she debuted National Geographic’s Restaurants at the End of the World, a lavishly filmed docuseries that sent her from the Arctic to Maine’s offshore islands to the Panamanian cloud forest. Now, she’s taking the reins from Padma Lakshmi as host of Top Chef, the granddaddy of food-competition shows.

Kish spent seven weeks in Wisconsin last summer, mostly in and around Milwaukee, filming the show’s 21st season, which premiers in March. It’s a less exotic locale than her recent Nat Geo datelines, but for Kish, who grew up in a suburb of Grand Rapids, Michigan, and now lives outside NYC, looking out over Lake Michigan was a familiar comfort. “When you grow up so close to one of the Great Lakes, it’s just a lake existence,” she says. Childhood summers were all about ice cream on the pier, lake-perch fish fries, and sailing lessons with her dad. She was a menace at the helm of the family boat, she admits, but nonetheless has its hull ID number tattooed on her arm. It’s inked there alongside the Korean name she was born with, her adoption case number, various knives and kitchen implements, and symbols of the cities where she’s lived and cooked as an adult, including Chicago, Boston, and Austin.

“I was always the kind of person who wanted to be in a big city,” Kish says. “I think a lot of younger people feel that way, especially growing up in Michigan. And I just craved it as an experience, as a way of finding myself.”

Today, she finds joy as readily in a Brazilian backwater as in a metro like Austin, where she regularly checks in on the kitchen at Arlo Grey, the restaurant she opened in 2018. (Her first hire is now the restaurant’s executive chef, carrying out a menu said to evoke “Kish’s nostalgia for meals from her Midwest upbringing.”) Her fierce work-travel schedule has given her a new appreciation for home, and when she and her wife do hit the road for pleasure, their itinerary is laid back and ad hoc. “Our favorite way of doing things is just to walk around all day,” Kish says. “I think so much can be learned just by walking through the streets and having spontaneous, random conversations with people.”

Kish was a teenager in 1999, when the Food Network first aired Japan’s Iron Chef, the catalyst for America’s now-25-year obsession with food-competition shows. Theatrical as such shows may be, she says, one of the legacies of Top Chef and programs like it is having introduced a generation to the real people putting food on their plates—not all of them white men, nor fussy alphas, nor devotees of haute cuisine.

“I’d never have thought it was going to become this thing where chefs are recognized in this way,” she says. “But it’s not just the French fine-dining chefs, who were once the defining faces of our industry. Now it’s just opened up, and food television and food-travel television are these opportunities for us to have a deeper understanding of other people.”

Top Chef season 21 premieres on Wednesday, March 20 At 9 p.m. ET/PT on Bravo. Episodes will be available to stream the next day on Peacock.