We used to share news about local chefs appearing on food television competitions and shows often here at Bites, but danged if there aren’t just a whole lot of them now! However, when a local hero actually wins a month-long cooking competition involving some of the most notable celebrity chefs in America, that’s still pretty newsworthy.
And that’s exactly what happened over the weekend, when chef Maneet Chauhan was crowned as the winner of Food Network’s Second Tournament of Champions, rising as the cream above a roster of chefs that included James Beard winners and Iron Chefs like Amanda Freitag, brothers Bryan and Michael Voltaggio, Jet Tila, Antonia Lofaso, Cat Cora and last season’s defending champion, Brooke Williamson.
While any sort of cooking competition can be problematic, kind of like staging a sculpture contest, the Tournament of Champions embraces its innate gimmickry including a supposedly random wheel of requirements that dictate the ingredients, style, equipment used and time limit for a round of cooking. Watching Guy Fieri spin that wheel like a contestant on The Price Is Right was pretty cheesy, but the pained reactions of the chefs when they saw the results seemed sincere.
For the finals against current belt holder Williamson, the wheels came up with some challenges for Chauhan. The chefs had 50 minutes to essentially concoct three different preparations of langoustines, and they had to use fresh wasabi and liquid nitrogen somewhere in their dishes. Chauhan defeated Williamson fairly soundly based on the scores of an esteemed panel of judges mad eup of Nancy Silverton, Marcus Samuelsson and Ming Tsai.
Trading on the same sort of bold spices and flavors as at her Nashville restaurants Chauhan Ale & Masala House, Chaatable, The Mockingbird and Tànsuǒ, Chauhan created a langoustine bisque, and aji amarillo langoustine blini and a tropical langoustine ceviche to take home the win. (If there had been a competition for coolest sneakers, Maneet would have swept every round of that, too!)
For her efforts, Chauhan received a new SUV plus $25,000 in prize money, but the Food Network execs added a really nice additional award for the winners of each round. Recognizing that the restaurant industry is still hurting and that the concept of pitting chefs against each other when everyone is just struggling to stay afloat was, well, troubling, they kicked in $10,000 in each round for the winning chefs to award to a restaurant of their choosing.
Chauhan was victorious in four rounds to win the championship, so she was able to give $40,000 to restaurateurs who she respects and thinks are important to their communities. Her first grant went to Garland in Raleigh, N.C., a restaurant run by Chauhan’s friend Cheetie Kumar who traveled with Maneet around the region cooking as part of the Brown in the South series highlighting chefs of Indian descent cooking in the American South. Other participants in those special dinners included Meherwan Irani, Vish Bhatt and Asha Gomez.
For her next three victories, Chuhan brought her largesse closer to home with $10,000 awards to Margot Cafe & Bar, Arnold’s Country Kitchen and Mangia Nashville. Sure, it’s great to be a celebrity chef on television and all, but Chauhan and her partners in Morph Hospitality have worked their tails off for more than a year to keep their restaurants in business, enduring the heartbreaks of massive staff layoffs and the struggle to keep their employees and customers as safe as possible during a pandemic. That Chauhan has been able to give back to her community while demonstrating her grace and talent under pressure under the bright studio lights of a kitchen competition is really remarkable and admirable! (Plus, she looked especially cool in those sparkly kicks while she was doing it.)
