Client: Kristen Kish – Talent
Precisely one-hour-and-40-minutes before Kristen Kish has to be in a car on her way to the set of Top Chef, her alarm clock goes off. She gets up. She drinks water. She drinks coffee. She sits in the dark in silence.
“I need my reset time, my meditation time, my me time,” says Kish. “I'm a deep introvert that requires that time if you expect me to go and host a television show.”
Kish continues, outlining how Max Goldcamp, her production coordinator, picks her up and drives her to set in a car stocked with Saratoga Spring water. They listen to music she describes as lo-fi chill vibe radio. She interrupts herself: “I know this is very detailed. I am very much a creature of habit to control my anxiety.”
Once Kish arrives, she says hello to anyone who’s there, a conscious choice she made to establish the culture on set, something she views as one of her duties as host. “There's an energy that I feel like I'm responsible to bring and to spread. Because it is, you know, it is just like kitchens—TV sets are a culture.”
She drops her bag in her dressing room. Goes to the bathroom. Meets her glam team, Alyssa Fall and Derek Yuen, in the makeup room. Fall does Palo Santo. She chooses the music, too, “anything from T-Pain to Celine Dion to Jungle,” says Kish. “She knows me at this point. She can tell by my energy if I need this or if I need that.”
In the makeup chair, Kish eats her breakfast, the same thing every day: at least three eggs (hard or soft boiled), avocado, and meat sticks. “I want low volume, high protein, good fat. I’m making sure my energy and calories—again, because it controls anxiety, too—are in a good place, but not taking up too much real estate. If I ate the breakfast I wanted to, good luck with me on TV.”
At some point the producers bring her scripts and go over the day. Someone hands her her clothes. She walks to set in her slippers (saying hello to everyone she passes). Someone puts her shoes on. Last looks. Rolling.
Affable and present, Kish is also deliberate and to the point; not cold, but direct. She looks you in the eye, but she won’t reveal more than she intends. Kish and I are sitting in the green room just off the set of the photo shoot for this story at InStyle’s New York City offices. It’s two-and-a-half hours earlier than our scheduled interview time; Kish was that efficient at the hair-makeup-picture portion of the day. (It doesn’t hurt that the chef and TV personality is also a strikingly beautiful former model.) A lifetime sufferer of, at times crippling, social anxiety, this structure and precision is all part of Kish’s mental health plan—a system she has set up around herself of boundaries and support to ensure that this extremely private person can thrive at her increasingly public career.
“I have to stick with my conviction on what I know and what I feel,” Kish tells me. “And those boxes could be very big at times, and sometimes they're really, really tight.”
Kish’s life first went from private to public back in 2012, when she competed on—and won—season 10 of Top Chef, the reality cooking competition show that has been one of Bravo’s biggest hits since it launched in 2006. After that, Kish starred in Fast Foodies and Restaurants at the End of the World and appeared periodically on Top Chef as a guest judge. She wrote a cookbook, Kristen Kish Cooking: Recipes and Techniques, in 2017; in 2018 she opened her own restaurant, Arlo Grey, in Austin, Texas.
“A lot of my job is public, not my life,” she says. “I live a very private life. I prefer it to be that way. Professionally, I get it. My job is public, and because of that, I have been able to succeed, and I've had great opportunities. So it's a balancing act. It comes down to: How am I feeling right now?” Publicity brings with it expectations—autographs, photographs. A Top Chef-watcher sees Kish and I walking to the greenroom and comes in to ask for a picture. Kish is in her robe. She politely declines. Later, she promises. “Fans do know me in a lot of ways, sure, but they're not entitled to any part of me.”
Her fame-level increased exponentially last year, when she replaced longtime Top Chef host Padma Lakshmi, who stepped down after season 20. Critics called the transition “seamless” and praised Kish’s performance on the Wisconsin-based season as “empathetic.” Still, Kish put a lot of pressure on herself. “I did a lot of therapy work to try to get my mind in the best, healthiest place,” she says. “[Thinking of] all the chefs walking in and seeing me, you're like, Are they going to be disappointed? I kept telling myself that this show is not about me or Padma or [judges] Tom [Colicchio] or Gail [Simmons] or anybody. It's a platform for the chefs. After the first 20 minutes of filming, I was fine.”
Kish now has two seasons of hosting under her belt—season 22, which takes place in Canada, premieres on March 13. In the time between tapings, Kish made some changes. “I knew I could do it better. I was like, Kristen, you're slouching too much. Or, You're trying to shrink yourself and not take up space in the room,” she says of watching the episodes back. “This season, I wasn't carrying around internal nervous energy and then projecting confidence on the outside. I actually was feeling it and projecting it this time.” She also used a certain word less frequently. “I realized that ‘fuck’ is very much a punctuation in my vocabulary, but it was too much.”
Regardless, I think we can all agree Kish’s first turn as host was a success. The show was, for the 18th time, nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Reality Competition Program. What’s more, Kish received a nod herself for Reality Host. “I was avoiding it for a little bit, trying to convince myself that I was not nervous or it didn't matter,” she says of the lead-up to the nomination announcement. “But of course, it matters—not just for me, but the entirety of our show. I win, we all win. Show wins, I win. So the nomination was enough. It truly was.” Pressure aside, she was excited about the process. “I’m a new member to the [Television] Academy, so, of course, I did all the things so I could vote, not only for our categories and for myself—I'd be lying if I said I didn't vote for myself. [But on the early ballot,] I voted for myself and Alan [Cumming, host of The Traitors]. I felt like it was good energy to put out there.”
Later this spring, fans will be able to get to know Kish, the person, even more closely with the publication of her memoir, Accidentally On Purpose (Little Brown and Company, April 22). For someone so private, a book revealing one’s highest highs, lowest lows, and innermost thoughts may seem a peculiar career move. It wasn’t something Kish sought out. But when the opportunity arose, she realized there is value in putting her whole story out there. “I was like, Do I have enough to say at 41? And so many people on my team and also my wife and close friends were like, ‘You have enough. There's a lot of life shit in there that people can can relate to.’”
The book covers not just Kish’s work in kitchens or her time on Top Chef, but the many internal struggles she’s grappled with and overcome in her life: anxiety, self-confidence, embracing her sexuality, substance use. “I'm in a position to share these things with people that are looking to me for something,” Kish says without hesitation. “I feel it's part of the story. I think it's important because secret struggles breed shame and guilt, whether that's secret from yourself or your immediate family.”
Being open about secrets, living gracefully in the public eye—what allows Kish to do all this is a deep sense of self. Knowing what feels right and natural and inherent, genuinely knowing, and then staying true to that, is a destination that Kish arrived at after a long journey. She didn’t always know, or perhaps trust, who she is.
In Accidentally on Purpose, she writes of desperately wanting to fit in growing up. That frequently meant doing or wearing things that felt like a performance or costume. Today, she refuses to do so. “It comes from needing to be the most confident version of myself,” Kish says. “Sometimes you might look at my everyday life and then look at me on TV, and you're like, Same person? I’m like, Same person—not from the outside, but from the inside. I am. I feel the same.”
Her look is distinct. Slim and tall (5’9”), she wears her short, black hair swept back—long on top, cropped on the sides. She favors high-waisted pants, vests, blazers. Tattoos line her arms, too many to count, enough that her mother says she needs to stop. “It's not that I want to stand out to be noticed,” she tells me, almost surprised by my question about her shift from following the trends to bucking them. “What it's about is feeling like me, and sometimes there are no words that you can define—I just know it when I put a piece of clothing on. I know what it feels like to feel me, because for so long I did not feel me.”
A lot of that self-assurance seems to have come from cooking. High school jobs at food court fast-food chains were quietly revelatory. “I think they showed me where I was good at something. Because it was order, it was efficiency. I could understand what I had to do without even thinking about what I had to do,” she says. “And that can drive a lot of confidence to a kid that didn't have a lot of confidence at the time.” After a year of college, she enrolled in culinary school at Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago at the suggestion of her mom. “I liked cooking shows”—Great Chefs of the World was an early favorite, its calming effect she likens to ASMR—“and what I was doing in my life at the time was not working, and it wasn't healthy. So, you know, I think great parenting is trying to figure out why your kids aren't happy, and try to help them find what will bring them a little bit of peace.”
Culinary school taught her what it was like to not have to “try so hard to be good at something.” Then, winning the coveted title of “Top Chef” gave her something little else had up until then: pride. When I ask about the number-one thing she took back to her regular life following her time competing, she answers, “That I'm good enough. Not just at cooking. … It's kind of hard to define what that is. It's a feeling. I started to feel proud of myself, which was a foreign feeling for me for a long time.”
Kish tries to engender such feelings in her colleagues and the chefs competing on the show today. “It's culture, it's support…It starts with how you encourage and speak to someone. You can keep boundaries and keep rules and accountability and fire and do all the things, but you can do it without taking someone down,” she says, adding that constructive criticism, even reprimanding young chefs at times, is in harmony with that. “I've been realizing the influence that I do have, at least in my immediate circle. If I can't progress the entire industry, I can progress what's in my control right now.”
Kitchens are still a male-dominated field. Kish writes in her book about feeling that she had to work twice as hard, cook twice as well, to earn less pay. In the 21 seasons of Top Chef that have aired, she is one of only six women who have won. I ask her if kitchen culture has changed since she started. “Yes. Still needing to change? Yes. Those two things can be true,” she points out. “I walk into my kitchen and I'm like, Let's not be assholes today. Like, Don't fucking touch anyone inappropriately. Why is that even something you have to fucking talk about?”
This incredulousness at things that seem obvious to Kish is a common theme in our conversation. Another example: Our discussion turns to marriage. Her parents have been married for more than 50 years; Kish wed Bianca Dusic in 2021. “Especially being a gay person who wasn't allowed to get married 10 years ago, I take marriage very seriously. …Fucking straight people fucked up marriage for so long—sorry. Like, you had something you're allowed to do and then you were careless with it? Not everybody, but when you're watching it from outside, when the world or the government is saying, ‘You can't get married, but all these people can,’ I'm just like, You gotta be fucking kidding me,” she says, exasperated. “So marriage carries that extra level of: If I'm gonna do it, I’m gonna fucking do it. It's not something that you can discard. It is a luxury in my life, so I treat it as such.” Intentionality is another theme I notice. Kish does little, it appears, without purpose.
The chef is channeling that intense attention into her next project. To fans’ assured delight, it’s another place to taste her food. Kish confirms she’ll be opening her first New York City restaurant inside the NED Nomad Hotel this year. Her response when I ask what she can share about it is an immediate “nothing,” but she does add: “I look forward to having people in.” And then finishes with a request: “Write nice reviews. Give us some grace.”
Kish may have nerves about the opinions that will come with the opening of her next baby (she doesn’t want kids and therefore considers restaurants the closest thing), but at least for the Top Chef portion of her profession, she’s come to possess a sense of calm. “I have nothing on the line. I'm not competing. My job is to be the most present, most genuine person in order to aid the conversation that we're all having as a group,” she says. “The thing that I have to worry about the most is making sure my alarm clock goes off in the morning.” One-hour-and-40-minutes early, of course.
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