Last week, Top Chef returned to the Bravo network for a second season, complete with a new host and a fresh-faced group of hungry culinary hopefuls. And one of this season’s contestants on the excellent cooking competition — which pits aspiring cooks against one another in immunity and elimination battles to win $100,000 in prize money, a feature in Food & Wine magazine, an appearance at the Aspen Food & Wine Classic, Kenmore PRO appliances, and the people’s fame and ovation forever — originally hails from the D.C. area.
Emily Sprissler is a 30-year-old “master cook” (a fancy name for “line cook”) at the MGM Grand’s Nob Hill restaurant in Las Vegas. According to her offical Bravo bio, the D.C. native, a California Culinary Academy graduate, is a confident trash-talker:
Emily is convinced she will blow all the other competition away. She describes herself as foul-mouthed and ill-tempered and claims that people often find her to be very brash. Emily likes to think she is one of the guys and can’t stand prissy girls.
Through a single episode, Sprissler hasn’t yet talked any smack, but she seems to have acquitted herself well with her two dishes she prepared for the judging panel. And Season 1 contestant and fan favorite Lee Anne Wong says that her former colleague is “a natural in the kitchen so I’m sure she will be fun to watch.”
And if the hot cooking competition and the D.C. connection aren’t reasons enough to watch this fun show, tune in to see the stunning, eloquent, and theoretically qualified Padma Lakshmi (she’s a cookbook author), who replaced as host the very leaden Katie Lee Joel (the child bride of Billy Joel) — a woman who possibly showed less emotion than Vicki from Small Wonder. Joining Salman Rushdie’s wife on the show as judges are craft chef Tom Colicchio and Food & Wine’s Gail Simmons. Although we’d like to see the D.C. contestant prevail, our money’s on Ilan Hall (a line cook at New York’s Casa Mono) or Sam Talbot (an executive chef in New York).
The next episode of Top Chef airs Wednesday at 9 p.m. on Bravo.
