We love us some Top Chef. But season after season, it’s the same old story. There are cheftestants from New York, Chicago, and LA but never DC (and no, Spike doesn’t count—he moved here after the fact). This time, though, we’ll finally have a hometowner to root for: Carla Hall, owner of Alchemy Caterers, will duke it out in New York with 16 other candidates for the $100,000 prize and so-far dubious honor.
The 44-year-old Hall graduated from Howard University’s business school with an accounting degree, then ditched the corporate world to model in Europe. Ironically, it was then, she says, that she fell in love with food. Her cooking style “balances the heart and soul of the South and the refinement of her classic French training,” says BravoTV.
Hall went on to L’Academie de Cuisine and has worked at the Henley Park Hotel, the State Plaza Hotel, and the Washington Club. According to Alchemy’s Web site, she has cooked for Al Gore, former DC mayor Anthony Williams, and congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton.
What we won't love? The absence of consummately droll judge Ted Allen. He’s being replaced by bumbling British meanie Toby Young, onetime restaurant critic and author of the Vanity Fair roman à clef How to Lose Friends and Alienate People.
Top Chef: New York begins Wednesday, November 12 at 10 PM on Bravo.
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Ann Limpert joined Washingtonian in late 2003. She was previously an editorial assistant at Entertainment Weekly and a cook in New York restaurant kitchens, and she is a graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education. She lives in Petworth.
