Gail Simmons Opens up About the Best & Worst Dishes She's Eaten on Top Chef
The Top Chef judge gets real about the food she's eaten over the years on the Emmy-nominated culinary competition show.
Gail Simmons has been at the Bravo's Top Chef judges' table since Season 1. That means that over the course of 21 seasons, she's basically tried every kind of food that the Cheftestants have cooked up over the years, which begs the question: What have been the best and worst dishes she's tasted?
"I’ve eaten hundreds of thousands of dishes of food," she told The Daily Dish in an interview in April 2024 about eating the culinary creations that come her way on the Emmy-nominated Bravo show, adding that along the way there have been "a few highlights and moments... There’s been a million highlights. Every season, there’s a few dishes that blow me away. There’s a few dishes I wanna forget."
Kristen Kish Reveals Her Best and Worst Dishes on Top Chef
Top Chef host Kristen Kish also spoke to The Daily Dish earlier this year, during which she also weighed in on this debate of best and worst dishes, but from the other side of the experience. She's the Emmy-nominated host of Top Chef these days, but, of course, she was a Cheftestant in the past.
From her time as a Cheftestant back in Season 10, she shared, "You know, I look back on that entire season, and I'm like, Oh my god, Kristen. What were you thinking? I don't know of any of them were the worst dishes I've ever cooked in my life because I've certainly cooked worse. You know, I think that there's some that I'm a little bit embarrassed by. But I think it's only simply because it was the time, and the trends of the year that I was on because it was over 10 years ago."
She did reveal a highlight from that time: "One of my favorite dishes, I will say, was this whole Reynold's Wrap quickfire, and I liked it because it was actually a challenge, where everything was wrapped — everything individually was wrapped in aluminum foil, and then we had to go into the pantry, grab everything, make a quickfire dish. And we had to use everything we grabbed. So, it was a challenge in and of itself to mentally [do it], so that was really fun."
Needless to say, Kristen ended up winning in Season 10 of Top Chef.
Tom Colicchio Reveals the Best and Worst Top Chef Food
Tom Colicchio, too, has experienced some highs and lows when it comes to the food he's had to eat as the head judge of Top Chef. In an interview with Mashed, Tom spoke about some of the tastiest meals he's had on the series.
"It's hard to say because for a long time, I had an easy answer to that, and that was Paul Qui," he said (BTW, Tom has said this about Paul in other interviews, so he's not lying). "In our Texas season, [Paul] did a dish that was very simple. It was a couple of roasted vegetables and dashi, and it just floored me in how simply and how really delicious it was, but since then, I know there are several times I've said, 'This is the best thing I've eaten.' So, in the course of the season, if I say, 'This is the best thing I've eaten,' I mean it."
When he appeared on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen back in 2020, Tom revealed that there was a time when he really couldn't stomach one of the dishes. "I was in a desert in Las Vegas. I forget [the chefestant's] name now... He made this cod ceviche in the summer that was like 90 degrees and it was horrible and I spit it out immediately," Tom recalled at the time. "I tried to hide behind a cactus, and I just spit it out."
-Additional Reporting by Stephanie Gomulka
