Top Chef Finalists Adrienne Cheatham and Joe Flamm Share Their Worst Kitchen Fails Ever

It's almost here... the moment Padma Lakshmi will name the Top Chef  for Season 15. Will it be Adrienne Cheatham or Joe Flamm? While both are clearly already winners — and phenomenally talented — to have made it this far in the competition, their work is not always executed to perfection. 

Reflecting on his biggest kitchen fail ever, Joe recalled to The Feast this absolutely horrific incident: "One time I stabbed myself in the stomach butchering a pig, poured some vodka on it, plastic wrapped my stomach and went back to work, [and then] didn’t tell my wife for three days because I thought she would be mad." 

Guess what? "She was," he admitted.

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For her part, Adrienne's biggest kitchen fail is somewhat more instructive — if a bit less gory. "One day at work, I helped the saucier put stocks on and put a pot of foie gras fat on his station to simmer," she recalled. "I didn’t check on it — [I] thought he was watching it — and the whole pot of fat burned. It was like bubbling tar in the pot."

So what did she learn from that experience? "I learned to never trust anyone and always check on things for myself, even if I’m not responsible for it," she said. "There was no way to fix it, besides cleaning more foie and rendering the fat from the scraps."

As for Joe... we can only imagine his takeaways. But we do know that despite the communication delay after that infamous incident, he'd never want to want to be too far from his wife when push comes to shove.