Top Chef's newest spinoff series Top Chef Amateurs is reinventing the classic format for amateur chefs. The new show focuses on giving superfans the Top Chef experience, pairing them with former contestants, and competing in adapted Top Chef challenges. The 30-minute episodes are designed for fun and heartwarming storylines, and most of all, a good time.
Screen Rant spoke to Magical Elves executive producers Zoe Jackson and Cat Sullivan - who developed and produced Top Chef Amateurs - and got all the inside information on the new series during an exclusive interview. They talked about their goals for the show and how they focused on honoring the history of Top Chef. From the challenges, all-stars, and new format of the show, the exec producers gave us insight into why fans of Top Chef will love Top Chef Amateurs.
If we can just start with a quick summary of the new show from you guys.
Zoe Jackson: Top Chef Amateurs is a show where we take two amateur chefs and pair them with two Top Chef alumni to cook within old and revamped Top Chef challenges from over the past seasons. And then they present their dishes and are judged by Gail Simmons, our host, and two different Top Chef alums. I probably could have said that more concisely.
Cat Sullivan: The mentors and judges are a rotating panel of the Top Chef alumni. So, you'll see familiar faces throughout the episodes.
What does each of you guys do on the show?
Zoe: I'm Zoe Jackson. I'm the executive producer and showrunner of the show.
Cat: And I'm Cat Sullivan. I'm the co-executive producer. So, I am basically Zoe's right hand throughout the show.
How did you guys start on Top Chef and entertainment? What has your career path looked like?
Cat: I got my start in the industry and on Top Chef basically at the same time. I graduated from Florida State University and knew I wanted to work in the entertainment industry. Through a contact that my brother had, he was trying to help me essentially get my foot in the door with someone in the industry. It just so happened to be an old producer at Top Chef, who sent me a very secretive email saying, "If you can make it from Florida to Seattle, there might be a job." I said, "Okay," and I packed up all my things.
I drove from Tallahassee, Florida to Seattle, Washington and found a place to live. I was a production assistant and, luckily enough, that worked out well. From there went on to go work on a lot of different other shows. But I think I've done four or five seasons of the main show of Top Chef, and now I do a lot of different competition series and cooking series. And it's been a wild ride.
Zoe: Your story is so much better than mine, Cat. I didn't pack up a car or anything. I actually got my start as a PA also. I graduated from Vassar College and didn't know what I wanted to do. So, I went to culinary school at the French Culinary Institute. I thought it was gonna be a chef, then realized I was not at all going to do that.
I ended up getting a job as a PA at a production company called Embassy Row, where I met one of my very good friends to this day, Dan. We worked together for a year at Embassy Row, hnd he left to go shoot Top Chef early on while I left to go work at ESPN.
I worked at ESPN for many years and worked my way up to being a producer there. And one day, Dan called me out of the blue and was like, "Do you want to come and work on Top Chef?" I was like, "Absolutely, please." So, he hired me as a field producer on Top Chef, and I ended up doing about seven seasons of Top Chef, give or take, a season of duels, and a couple of spin-offs.
Cat: Zoe has me beat in that category. She has more Top Chefs than me.
Zoe: Yeah, I've been in the world for quite some time. I bounced around on a ton of competition shows, a lot of stuff for Bravo and other channels and things, and landed back here again. Luckily for me, Magical Elves wonderfully called me to work on this show with Cat.
You're taking challenges that were originally on Top Chef and using them for the new show. What other things are similar in Top Chef Amateurs, and what will fans be excited to see?
Cat: I guess the biggest thing would be that our show takes place in the Top Chef kitchen. That's a really big moment for a lot of people watching at home. It was a huge moment for our cast. They didn't know that they were going to be walking into the kitchen and that they were going to get to cook in the kitchen. It was this amazing, magical moment of that all coming together for them.
Zoe and I dug through 700 challenges to get - quite literally 701 challenges - to get to the core of what makes Top Chef so magical. And that's what you see in the series, and what we shot was taking 700 and moving it down to whatever it was in the end.
Zoe: 10 or 12? 14? Something like that.
Yeah, we really wanted to make sure the super fans got the full experience, as far as we could, of being on the show without being able to go outside or do anything like that. From being paired up with an alarm and getting the cook with them to being judged by an alum, and Gail being there in the Top Chef kitchen. Every step of the way, like getting a Top Chef's coat put on, we really wanted to make sure that they were getting the experience that would mean something to them.
We wanted to make sure this was fun and funny, but also heartwarming. And we wanted people to walk away, whether they won or lost, feeling like they had done something really special and cool. And I think we managed to accomplish that somehow.
On the opposite end, what's the biggest difference between the two shows?
Zoe: Every week, you're getting new people, so there's that. Like Cat said earlier, it is a rotating like, list of alumni. And every episode is a standalone, so you can watch them out of order. We get two new amateurs every single time, so we're not following people's character arcs over the course of many, many episodes. I feel like that's probably the biggest difference.
Cat: And then from the challenge side of things, every episode takes place in the kitchen. We don't go out into the real world, like you would see with our chefs on the regular show. We try to bring the magic of those challenges into the kitchen when we adapted them for Top Chef Amateurs.
I think the biggest thing is that this is the first time that amateurs and super fans and people who just love the property and the series are getting the chance to show off what they're passionate about and show off what they can do. They're bringing different flavors to the kitchen that maybe we haven't had a chance to experience yet, and different backgrounds. It's just really exciting that it's become this really fun extension to the traditional, classic Top Chef.
Could you tease any of the alums that are gonna be on?
Zoe: I think they've all been announced, but we can tease them. Gregory Gourdet, Kwame Onwuachi...
Cat: Shirley Chung, Eric Adjepong, Stephanie Cmar.
Zoe: Melissa King, Dale Talde, Isaac Toups, Richard Blais, Joe Flamm, Jenn Carroll.
Cat: I think that's it.
Zoe: From all across seasons, which is something else I think might be exciting for the fans. Because outside of All-Stars, you don't really get to see that many people from different seasons interacting with each other. And they're really funny with one another, so you’ve got your faves doing different stuff, competing against each other, judging with each other - and judging each other, which is interesting and fun.
What did you guys like the most about working on Top Chef Amateurs?
Cat: Zoe and I have worked together in the past, but I think that it was kind of amazing to get to work closely together and really develop a show that we know that people are going to have a grand reaction to because there's so much love for Top Chef. But to get to really look at every angle of the show, fall back in love with that, and to get to develop it and bring our own kind of ideas into it and create something - that's really special.
And getting to work with Magical Elves and with Bravo, and to really make this thing that's full circle, and really brings the fans back into the show and lets them have a moment to just shine? I think that was really amazing to get to do.
Zoe: Yes, I totally agree with Cat. The top thing for sure was just that Cat and I got to work really closely together; we were basically on FaceTime all day long. We were together many, many hours a day - and that was fantastic. Just being able to bounce stuff off each other and get to know each other's working styles and do stuff with each other was awesome.
But also the crew has worked together for a really long time. Working on the regular show is really hard - it's really fun, but it's tough. And this was almost a weird way to see the result of all of that hard work on that show. Because these amateurs are so excited to be there: they were talking to people behind the scenes being like, "Oh my God! You're the person that holds the camera? That's amazing!"
I think the crew being able to see the amateurs' reactions to all of their hard work was something really special. Because we don't really ever get to see what people think of what the thing is, once it's out into the world. And them being there, and the way that they reacted to every little aspect of everything that was going on, was really cool. I think it reinvigorated everyone, and we're like, "Yeah, we do have kind of a cool job."
Cat: You definitely forget. It was very funny. Some of the cast members did go up to literally anyone on the crew and were like, "I'm a fan of your work." And you're like, "What?"
I know you couldn't really do the challenges outside of the kitchen, but what other things did you have to change because of COVID?
Zoe: Honestly, I don't know that COVID-19 was really as much of an issue because we're in the bubble. We're all protected, and things were pretty secure. I think, more than anything, it was time. It takes a couple of days to shoot an episode of Top Chef, and we were shooting two episodes in one day.
So, we really had to go through the challenges and see what we could get done in a shorter amount of time than what they had. A lot of that stuff needed to be tweaked. It's like, "Okay, you're not gonna break down a whole pig. We're gonna give you a side of beef." We're gonna just try to consolidate this into a way that is 30 minutes-able.
Cat: I think it was also more of a change because we have amateurs in the kitchen, so how do we make these challenges more approachable for someone that's not a five-star chef or a trained chef. Taking that into account, and really trying to make it so the people on the show have a fair chance at succeeding.
Because at the end of the day, the show definitely is a lot lighter in tone than Top Chef can be sometimes. There aren't eliminations - people are just getting to live their dream out on camera in the kitchen with people that they've idolized for years. And there's really nothing else like it.
Zoe: Totally agree. I think we also wanted to make sure that - again, because these people are super fans, and they've been watching the show for so long - we were giving them challenges of things that they've always wanted to try. Everybody wants to do them, it's fun. You want to figure out a way to spin that into an actual cooking challenge, because a lot of times on the show, it's just a quickfire where they make food and move on.
We wanted to make sure we were paying homage to the history of Top Chef while we were choosing things.
Cat: And I think the other thing is that I think everyone at home is like, "I would be able to accomplish that blind taste test challenge." Everyone at home watching can speak a big game, but then when you're put up to the test, how do you [fare]? It's kind of fun to let people actually try to do those things. Then you put a clock on them, and you're like, "Okay, you don't have a lot of time, but you have everything you could possibly need to make anything you want," how quickly they become just like the chefs on the show. That pressure sets in.
Top Chef Amateurs airs on Thursday nights on Bravo at 9PM EST.