Brittanny Anderson appears on season 18 of Bravo’s “Top Chef,” which premiered April 1. (Photo by David Moir courtesy Bravo)
Four months pregnant, Richmond baker Keya Wingfield traveled to California in the fall of 2020 to be a contestant on the seventh season of Food Network’s “Spring Baking Championship.” Wingfield, the owner of namesake baking venture Keya & Co., took a huge risk, leaving her business, brand and family behind for the chance to go head to head with 10 of the best bakers in the country.
“I had never been away from my daughter for more than a few hours at a time,” Wingfield says. “Doing a competitive show carried uncertainty about how long I’d be gone, since it depended on how far I made it in the show, so that was extremely hard.”
The experience, Wingfield says, was hyper-focused, with long days of filming from sunup to late in the evening. Quarantined together, the cast spent weeks isolated from the outside world, immersed in baking and filming during the day and sequestered in their rooms at a resort each night. Frequent temperature checks and COVID-19 tests were standard.
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Keya Wingfield (Photo courtesy Food Network)
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Richmond baker Keya Wingfield on Food Network’s “Spring Baking Championship” (Photo courtesy Food Network)
Under the glare of the lights, bobbing and weaving among 20 camera operators, the ever-present clock ticking down through a preheat round and a main heat with its signature sinister twist, Wingfield says the competition was just as intense as it appears to viewers.
“The time is real,” the 36-year-old baker says. “There’s no stopping for production. It’s as real as it seems on TV.”
Those high expectations revealed skills Wingfield says she didn’t even know she had, like the ability to make a two-tiered cake from start to finish in two hours. With an exceptionally well-stocked pantry, she had a bounty of ingredients at her fingertips, but Wingfield often found herself returning to the familiar flavors of her childhood in Bombay, often using ghee, saffron and cardamom in her creations.
Centered on the Hindu spring festival of Holi, a preheat challenge in the second episode had Wingfield in her element. Making a parfait, she won, earning an advantage for the heat that followed. When judges Duff Goldman, Nancy Fuller and Kardea Brown reacted with appreciation for Wingfield’s bold flavors, she says, “It assured me I was on the right track with the kind of food I like to make.”
Tye Hall competed on Food Network’s “Supermarket Stakeout,” with episodes airing this summer. (Photo courtesy Food Network)
Wingfield isn’t the only local chef to have spent some time in the glow of Food Network’s cameras recently. Chef Tye Hall, co-owner of Common Sense Cuisines and Gourmet Hemp Foods, competed on Food Network’s “Supermarket Stakeout” in 2020. (Her episode will air this summer.) After a long audition process involving several calls stretched over two years, Hall was cast on the one-off competition where contestants must ask random shoppers to sell them their groceries to cook with over three high-speed rounds.
Hall says that after contestants have caught the attention of network producers, those contestants are more likely to return for other productions, and she’s counting on that. “Once you’re there, if your personality is winning, you go in this little pool, and they’ll call you when they feel like your personality will shine,” she explains. Hall, a veteran and former nurse from West Philadelphia, has personality for days, with a story for every occasion painting a picture of the fascinating life she’s lived. That personality is on the plate (or in the pot) on Hall’s own show, “From the Bottom of the Pot,” a series on Taste on TV, a culinary-focused streaming platform that provides a voice for African Americans and other people of color.
Despite Hall’s experience cooking in front of the camera, she says the competition was daunting: “You can do as much training as you want, but honestly, when you’re there in the heat of the moment, a lot of it just sort of falls away.”
Also facing competition was Bravo’s “Top Chef” season 18 chef-testant Brittanny Anderson, whose growing culinary empire includes Metzger Bar & Butchery, Brenner Pass, and Black Lodge, as well as her Washington, D.C., venture, Leni.
“It was always something in the back of my mind that I thought about doing, but it never seemed like a reality,” Anderson says. “With the pandemic and the way my work was, it was just an opportunity, so when they called, I took advantage of it.”
Due to the pandemic, this season of “Top Chef” presented its own challenges. Instead of contestants sprinting through the aisles of Whole Foods, they used online ordering through Whole Foods/Amazon Prime, which Anderson says added “another layer of drama and angst in the shopping process.” The chefs also stayed in a hotel, rather than sharing a house, as previous casts have done. But despite that, Anderson, a quintessential extrovert, says she has “14 new best friends.”
Brittanny Anderson (center) is the first Virginia competitor to appear on “Top Chef.” (Photo by David Moir, courtesy Bravo)
“Top Chef” wasn’t Anderson’s first experience with televised competitive cooking; she previously appeared on “Chopped” and “Iron Chef America,” where she faced off against celebrity chef Alex Guarnaschelli. “I knew that this would be a much more intense process and more challenging all the way around — being away from family and being in competition mode the entire time.” Anderson says the competition was, above all, a test of mental fortitude, requiring 24/7 focus.
“I don’t think I could quantify what I learned on the show,” she says. In addition to regular judges Tom Colicchio, Gail Simmons and Padma Lakshmi, the latest season includes a rotating panel of previous contestants acting as guest judges, including Kristin Kish (who cooked with Anderson at Metzger for a Fire, Flour & Fork dinner in 2017), Kwame Onwuachi and Melissa King.
The second competitor from Virginia, Anderson says she hopes to watch other chefs from her home state compete in the “Top Chef” kitchen in the future. Likewise, chef Hall hopes to see more opportunities for diverse chefs in the world of competitive cooking TV, ideally as judges. And for Wingfield, her experience on “Spring Baking Championship” all comes back to her affinity for Richmond: “My love for this city and the support I’ve always had from this community drove my spirit to perform my best,” she says. “Doing this show is a love letter to Richmond.”
This article has been corrected to note that Brittanny Anderson is the second ”Top Chef” contestant from Virginia
