Top Chef has cooked up seasons across nearly a dozen U.S. cities as well as London and Canada.
The long-running Bravo series is currently airing Season 23, which is largely set in North Carolina. But host Kristen Kish is licking her lips at the prospect of taking the show even further afield in the future.
“We would love to do at least a finale. I’m looking right at you, a finale in Tokyo. I mean, the food is just something to explore and to celebrate. That being said, I will go anywhere you give me a plane ticket and I am there. Australia. I would love to do that. My wife is Australian, so I would like to go explore all of that. But again, you could send us to the middle of nowhere in Cincinnati, Ohio, and I’d be completely fine too, because at the end of the day, we’re still getting great chefs, good story and amazing food,” she said at Deadline’s Reality TV Summit.
Kish said that one of the reasons that she loves Top Chef is that it is not a studio show. “We go to a different city, and then within that city and state, we are traveling everywhere. It is a huge production, we are moving 300 person crews, and then on top of that, you’re building kitchens in fields, you’re hooking up gas lines where gas doesn’t exist. You’re making sure everything is still workable for a chef to perform at their highest, highest ability,” she added.
This season, for instance, has the chefs cooking on a racetrack. “That was a little hot. I kind of wish I got a little roof, but, yeah, I mean, it is amazing where you can set up places to cook,” she said.
Kish was working in restaurants such as Sensing and Stir before she appeared on Top Chef. But she admitted that she never really wanted to be on television. “I competed on season 10, which was over a decade ago. At the time, I was cooking for 10 people a night, living my happy, glorious minding in my own business life. My boss was like, hey, national television sounds exciting, doesn’t it? I said it absolutely does not. But the thing that really got me to say yes at the end of the day is she said, we need more women in our industry, in the cooking world on television, representing on national television shows. I was like, well, when you put it like that, I feel like I have a duty. So, I did it, and I am so, so grateful that I said yes,” she said.
She got the call to host the show when she was flying from Thailand to New York. “It was a very quick yes internally. Then I had to try to figure out emotionally, and start booking all my therapy sessions to be like, ‘Yes, I can actually, I can do this, and I can handle it’. Because, again, it was never really part of my being to want to stand in front of a camera hosting a television show,” she said.
Kish said that Top Chef is the cooking show that is trusted by chefs and it can bring incredible opportunities to those that appear on it.
She has also been credited with a more compassionate way of hosting a cooking show, rather than the berating that previously featured on many food shows.
“It’s also mirroring what’s actually happening in the industry, and what we want to see and doing the things that being the change that we want to see, which is also really important. You know, it’s not hard to be a good person, like I don’t understand why we got to keep shouting at people on television,” she added.
Kish was nominated for the Emmy for Outstanding Host For A Reality or Reality Competition Program in 2024 and 2025. She joked that when she attended the Emmys, she had a “huge fan girl” moment when she turned around to see Meryl Streep.
“I chose a world in kitchens like. This is absolutely bonkers,” she said. “It is a room that I never, never in my wildest dreams could have ever imagined myself in.”
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