“We created monsters”: “Top Chef”’s Gail Simmons says the show changed how Americans dine out

Gail Simmons believes that "Top Chef" has created a generation of monster-diners — and she would know. The veteran judge of Bravo's hit culinary competition series, which is now entering its 21st season, has experienced the culinary world in its many different facets, from authoring a cookbook to now serving as the series' executive producer. She's seen the way that food media, including "Top Chef," has made everyone with a fork and a social media account think they can do her job.

“There's pros and cons I think to all of it. There is the problematic issue that now everybody's a critic. Everybody can go on social media and take down a restaurant if they don't get what they want.” she told Salon Talks in a recent interview. “It makes everyone think that they can. There's a lot of damage that they can do if they don't understand food and real food criticism.”

She continued: "When I said we created monsters, I was serious.”

The series itself is undergoing some major changes this season, namely that longtime host Padma Lakshmi departed and has been replaced by season 10 winner Kristin Kish.

The show is also featuring a city never highlighted on the series before: Milwuakee, Wisconsin.

“I think Milwaukee was actually a great location because it is something that I think will surprise our viewers,” Simmons said, “The season before our 20th season, we were in London, and everybody knows a lot about London. London is one of the great cities of the world. It's massive and it's a huge food city on the world stage. Milwaukee, less so, but there's a lot going on. It's really up and coming and I think that this will change people's views about the city.”

Watch my "Salon Talks" episode with Gail Simmons here or read a Q&A of our conversation below to hear more about returning to the Midwest, how the state of Wisconsin made her fall in love with custard, and what the new host Kristen Kish hopes to bring to the table. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Congratulations on the 21st season of “Top Chef.” Everybody's excited and looking forward to everything you're going to have going on in Madison and Milwaukee. How does it feel to just be so successful for so long?

It definitely is unexpected that we have been on the air for so long. Television shows come and go, but to have 21 seasons under our belt feels pretty amazing. I think television has changed so much in that time. Twenty years is a generation and we've surpassed that in seasons. We, I think, have seen such a massive change in television, in food, in eating and cooking, and it's awesome to think that we had a small piece to do with it. I think at this point, “Top Chef” can take the credit for contributing to the changes in the way that America eats, in the way that we think about food, talk, cook. We've created a generation of incredible, talented chefs, so many of whom have been on our show and gone on to do the most extraordinary things and we're really proud of that.

“Top Chef” really had one of my friends who's a chef, swirling his noodles up, slicing the hot dog diagonally and making it stand up again. 

That's right. We created monsters, but we're actually really proud of it because I do think that even though sometimes we can't believe that there's a lot of silly language and food can get really crazy of course on social media and things like that, we are proud of the fact that it also made people so much more aware of what they eat, of the way that they cook, of what they eat, when they go out, where they go, and I think in a way, the show changed the economy of restaurants in America.

Absolutely. This is the first time you guys have been back in the Midwest since season four of Chicago. I recently spent some time in Milwaukee and Chicago. Culturally, the cities are very different places, night and day. How would you define each individual place by their food? 

Well, Milwaukee was interesting. Truthfully, I had never been there before until we went to shoot there, so I sort of love that, when I go to a city with very little preconceived notion of the food scene. 

If anything, I underestimated Milwaukee. When you go to a city like Chicago, it has such a big reputation from a food standpoint. Obviously, there's so many heavyweight chefs there. Chicago is really the epicenter of a lot of incredible food and many movements about food have been started there. It has incredible, massive communities of immigrants and populations that have done so much for the food industry, and Milwaukee is like its lesser known little brother.

Colder little brother too.

It's cold, it is, but it really showed me a totally different picture of the Midwest, and I think the Midwest is a massive obviously swath of this country with a lot of people and a lot of history. When you think about Milwaukee, sure, you think of beer and you think of cheese, and when you think of Wisconsin, you think of sausages. Whatever you think, there's a reason that they're all there, and that's part of what is awesome about “Top Chef” is that we go to a place and we don't just eat hot dogs. We learn the history of the hot dog, why it's significant, who brought it? What's the story there and how do we make our chefs dig a little deeper to create something from that that we've never seen before?

So I think Milwaukee was actually a great location because it is something that will surprise our viewers. The season before our 20th season, we were in London, and everybody knows a lot about London. London is one of the great cities of the world. It's massive and it's a huge food city on the world stage. Milwaukee, less so, but there's a lot going on. It's really up and coming and I think that this will change people's views about the city.

Wisconsinites are prideful and you already mentioned the bratwurst, but I want to talk about cheese curds, frozen custard, the beer. What is your favorite Wisconsin staple?

Frozen custard without a doubt. [It’s] delicious. We were shooting in the middle of summer and our new host Kristen and I went for frozen custard several times a week. It is delicious. I would argue that it is better than soft serve. It is the richest, most decadent, delicious ice cream I've ever had. A frozen treat, let's call it.

So you can only get it there?

You can only get it in the Midwest.

This is why people need to get down there.

Mm-hmm, eat a frozen custard.

What about the cheese? What do you think about the way Midwesterners take their cheese very seriously?

They take cheese very seriously. More seriously than I'd ever really known. But there's also a reason, right? First of all, the custard and the cheese have something in common. The dairy industry is very much alive in Wisconsin, and that dates back dozens and dozens of years, really till before the Second World War. 

How I understand it, agriculturally, the dairy farming community was struggling in the Great Depression and the governor of Wisconsin mandated that every meal in a restaurant had to have dairy. It had to have butter, had to have cheese. So frozen custard was born. I might be generalizing and telling the story a little simply right now, but that's why there's so much cheese. Butter burgers were born there, and the cheese making industry in Wisconsin is incredible. 

I'm not talking about just big hunks of cheddar and cheese curds. I'm talking about beautiful, nuanced, artisanal cheese made by some of the greatest cheese makers in the world.

Yeah, hearing you talk about it, it's making me hungry, but we're going to get through this.

Yes! That's the point. That's the point.

One of our favorite chefs and “Top Chef” winners, Kristen Kish, has taken over as the host. What do you think she's going to bring to the table?

Having Kristen come on and take over for Padma [Lakshmi] was just an opportunity for a reset for the show overall because we've been doing this a long time and when someone new comes in in that position, it caused us to question, to change, to tweak, to evolve, and I think that's what keeps “Top Chef” fresh, and Kristen will do that for sure.

She'll bring her own style. She's a professional chef, she's won the show, so having a winning contestant as the host gives an enormous amount of empathy I think for the contestants. She treats them in a completely different way. She has a different relationship with them. She really understands what they're going through. She addresses them differently, but also she inspired us to make a lot of other changes to the game and to really up the ante. To make it harder, more challenging, more exciting, to put in a few more twists and turns along the way. She also just has her own style, and I think that that'll just feel really new. We just loved having her around. She's such a giant ball of sunshine. She was awesome.

We are looking forward to it. Anything else fans should be looking forward to this season?

We made a lot of changes. There's some changes to the way we run our Quickfire Challenges, which are the quick challenges in the first part of the show. We used to give immunity to the winner of a Quickfire Challenge and we've taken that off the table for Quickfires. We're still giving away money so there's incentive to win the Quickfire, but now, immunity only comes if you win the elimination challenge, and that's a huge change. It sounds like a simple tweak, but it's a huge change to how contestants then have to play the game and strategize, so I think you're going to see how that shifts everybody's mindset.

You're now executive producer. Congratulations.

Yes, thank you.

Has taking on an executive role presented any new challenges?

I've always been involved in the show. Tom [Colicchio] and I, Padma too, from the beginning have always contributed, have always given our thoughts. It's always been a really collaborative effort. Our producers have been with us a really long time and so we all work together naturally. So I've been consulting as a producer on the show for years, but to come in as an executive producer just gave me a little more hands-on insight into some of the issues in the show, and it opens up kind of greater discussion pieces that I can get involved in, which I love. I love being behind the scenes. I love figuring out myself how I can help more, how we can make it bigger, how we can make every episode better and different because the show's been around a long time and we're only going to stay on the air if we keep it fresh.

Tom was on last year and he said that one of the things that he loved about the show so much is that the judges made decisions with the producers.

Yes, that's true.

It wasn't some producer just sitting behind a curtain saying, "Do this and do that." It was all natural. Can you talk about how important that is?

There's this evolution that we've seen in reality television over the last 20 years or so and I definitely think that “Top Chef” is a great example of it. It used to be that reality shows were performative and some shows might've made decisions about contestants being eliminated or not or sticking around longer than maybe they should have because they were good for TV, because they were charismatic or they were controversial. “Top Chef” doesn't run that way and Tom really has been our north star in leading that charge. 

We've never made decisions, and our producers have always trusted us in this, we've never made decisions based on anything except the food that we eat from the chefs, and it has to stay that way in order to be fair. I don't care if that person is great for camera. In the early years, there was a lot more drama, but what this has done, ensuring that we make decisions only based on the food in front of us, not based on the personalities of the chef, is that it ensures that the best chef wins and it ensures that we have a fair and honest playing field and very open discussions about food where we can give our honest opinions, we can be constructive, and we can have really great conversations with the contestants because we're not looking for an answer. We just want them to break down their craft, to speak freely to us, and we want to be able to do the same instead of trying to hide or create drama or try and lead them to act a certain way. That doesn't fly on our set, and I think it's just made it a better show because of it.

I think over the years, we've all learned that you are an expert. 

I eat a lot, I eat a lot, D.

And we trust you a lot. So my question in terms of judging, if you have two dishes in front of you and they're both, whatever the top is, five star level meals and they're plated perfectly and there's a beautiful story behind each dish, how do you choose between meal A and meal B?

That's the best and worst part of the job. That's the goal. We want all the food to be amazing, but the better the food is, the harder the job gets. So that's why there's three of us and then a fourth guest judge every episode, because we're all going to have slightly different takes on every dish. It's not a dictatorship. Well, I wouldn't call it a democracy because the chefs don't get a vote, but it is a collaborative effort between the four of us on every decision that we make. We all have to agree, we all have to be comfortable with the decision, and we all have a chance to state our opinions and then convince each other about making those decisions.

When you have two amazing dishes, what it comes down to is then taking those dishes apart, looking at things like cooking technique, knife skills, doneness. It's not just does it look pretty and does it taste good? Those are the first things you're looking for, but then you have to dig a little deeper. What was the inspiration? Did they cut the onions in the proper way for the best cooking outcome? And then it becomes a little bit subjective because I'm going to think slightly differently than Tom who's going to think slightly differently than Kristen or our guest judge, and it just becomes a really great conversation. At the end of the day, we convince each other, we change each other's minds. We don't always go in thinking the same thing, but we come out believing that we've made the right choice together.

Do you ever go home one night, fall asleep and wake up and say, "Damn, maybe I should have picked this other one"?

Not often. That's a good question. I have never on the long-term regretted a decision that I've made on the show, and I think that if we did, we wouldn't leave the judges' table. I will say that we have, especially in the early years, had many, many nights at the judges' table where we spoke until the wee hours of the morning. The sun came up, the roosters started crowing, and we were there talking and talking and talking because they wouldn't let us leave until we knew we had the right decision. 

They don't let us get up from the table until we're all comfortable and we all agree and we feel confident that we've picked the right person or that we've sent the right person home because of that exact reason, our producers don't want us to wake up the next morning and realize that we did it for the wrong reasons or that we weren't comfortable with being forced into doing something a certain way. So that doesn't often happen the next day, but in the moment, sometimes those decisions are excruciating and take hours because we want to make sure that when we go to bed that night, we can sleep.

I feel like “Top Chef” is as brilliant as it is intimidating, right?

Yes, it is intimidating.

I'm a pedestrian in the kitchen, but I'm in this phase where I'm trying to learn how to cook more things at home.

That's great. That's the point of the show, to inspire you.

What advice would you give me in terms of learning to be my own little Top Chef?

Obviously, "Top Chef" is about professionals. All the people on our show, all the contestants have been cooking for 10 plus years. They are at the pinnacle of their careers. They are not amateurs. Our show is not an amateur show at all so we're not looking for amateurs who think it would be fun to be chefs, but we are looking to inspire you in the kitchen, to make you think about food, to make you try things you've never tried, go out and eat a different dish or buy a new ingredient.

I would say, people ask me a lot, "How are you a foodie? I'm not a foodie, I don't like cooking. I'm not good at it." People love to tell me how they're a bad cook. My answer, which is the same answer to your question, is you're not born a good cook the same way you're not born a pro basketball player. [It takes] hours of practice. You're not born knowing how to play the piano. That doesn't mean that some people aren't better at it than others, but I do believe no matter who you are, if you do it enough, if you practice, if you put the time into it, then you will become a great cook. Anyone can be a good cook. It just requires focus, attention, and a little bit of passion.

I would be nervous if you were sitting at my dinner table. 

It makes me so sad because all I really want is people to cook. I don't need them to cook fancy food. People think that I just eat 12 course tasting menus for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I really don't,

Wait, you don't?

I know. I know. It's true. It's like the last thing we want. What's on “Top Chef” is obviously amazing cooking and it's an extreme and I feel really lucky that I get to eat all that food, but in day-to-day life, like when I go to a friend's house or when I'm out for dinner or when I'm coming to someone's house for the first time, I just want them to love being in the kitchen. I'm happy with a box of spaghetti and a can of tomato sauce if you've been happy making it.

It's funny because I can imagine telling my wife, "Hey, my friend Gail's coming over for dinner." "Oh, who's Gail?" "Oh, she's only been eating the best food for the past 21 years from the best chefs."

You know what? I'd make it easy. I'd help. I just want to cook together.

The pressures off.

I swear I'm fun at a dinner party.

I heard you reference your mom running a cooking school and your dad making his own wine. Can you talk about your family's influence on how you look at food and how you judge?

It's funny to think back to the influences on your life because you don't always see them when you're growing up. It's only when you become an adult and come into your own self and figure out who you are that you realize that those things were inescapable. My mother was a cooking teacher. She ran a cooking school out of our house and she wrote a food column for the national paper in Canada, the Globe and Mail, while I was young, for the first probably 10 years of my life. But it was just something your mom did and you didn't think much about it. I didn't realize what a trailblazer she was and how that would obviously very directly influence what I did with my career.

She went on to have a second career. I grew up, went to college, never thought about food until really the year that I was graduating college. Only then when I told her and my father and their friends that I really loved food and I wanted to learn how to be a cook and I wanted to go into food media did they all say, "Well, obviously. You're just like your mother." That would crush me a little bit. I didn't want to be just like my mother when I was 21. What 21-year-old wants to be told that they're just like their parents and that their destiny is out of their own hands? I thought I was being original until they pointed out that it actually wasn't very original.

But those phases are funny though, right? It's like when you're young, you're like, "I'm not my parents." Then when you get older, you're like, "Oh, okay, mom. I understand you a little better." When you have your own kids, you're like, "Okay, I'm ready to forgive you."

And you're like, "Wow." Not only are you ready to forgive them, but you are in awe of them because you're like, "How did they do this and manage the kids and raise us to be generally decent people?" It is hard work, but I'm very grateful to both my parents for that. My father, while he wasn't a cook, loved great food, loved traveling, and he liked food projects, so he made his own wine, he made his own pickles, his own applesauce, and all those things add up, and I think they really helped me to formulate what I ended up doing in my adult life.

I have a 4-year-old and she won't eat anything unless she helps. She pushes her chair next to the stove and she literally has to throw things in the pot or she won't touch it. She's my best friend, but she's a tough person to get along with at times.

As four year olds are. I've got a 5-year-old. I understand.

As a mother too, are you able to get your kids to try new and exotic things or is it still Cheerios?

I would say a little of everything. Cheerios go a long way in certain circumstances, but I would say your daughter is ahead of all of us. What I always say to people about the struggle of feeding your kids and getting them to try new things and getting them to eat other things than just the five things that every kid wants to eat all the time is exactly what your daughter's doing. My advice is always get them involved, because they will first of all, learn confidence, second of all, take pride in their food, and third, they will be way more open to eating things if they've had a hand in it.

I would actually argue that your daughter is spot on and just keep doing it. The more you do it, first of all, it's great time together, right? That's like quality time. Because otherwise, they just want the screen and then you're fighting with them to get off the screen and who knows what else is going on. So if you can get them into the kitchen and get them cooking, I would say give her the responsibility of cooking dinner. That is a great life skill. It'll bring you guys together and it will open her up to tasting new foods, and I think it's a win-win.

I'll judge her.

Yeah, judge her, but also applaud her because I think it's pretty cool that she wants to cook with you.

No, sometimes when we're in the kitchen, we're like “The Bear,” so we're calling each other chef, like, "Okay, chef. Hand me the knife, chef. Get the pepper, chef." She's like, “Okay, chef.”

That's awesome. That's awesome. I think that it's chaotic. For me, my kids want to get in the kitchen too and I really want them there, but then that's my space. So I get stressed out because they make a mess and they throw things around and they don't do it the way I want them to do it, but I need to always remind myself to let it go, because they're having fun and it doesn't matter if it comes out perfectly or not. The fact that they're involved and that they want to hang out in the kitchen with you, I think that is really the important piece of the puzzle.

With social media, TikTok, the explosion of DIY culture in general, how do you think the conversation around food has changed? Everybody's an expert. I think of that “South Park” episode when they discovered Yelp, so everyone was walking into a restaurant saying, "I'm a food critic. I have Yelp." 

It's true. When I said we created monsters, I was serious. There's pros and cons to all of it. There is the problematic issue that now everybody's a critic. Everybody can go on social media and take down a restaurant if they don't get what they want. There's a lot of damage that they can do if they don't understand food and real food criticism that people study years to do properly and to do justly, and to understand what actually goes into running a restaurant, how hard it is, the challenges that they're facing, so that you can understand why restaurant experiences aren't always as you want them to be and how you can improve them and make that a constructive conversation. So that's the downfall of social media and the Yelpification of the world.

But the pro that I think is actually really amazing is that it's also democratized food. Everybody has a voice now. So you as a restaurateur can't treat some people some way and other people another way because you don't know who those people are and they have the power to have a voice and to change the conversation and you can't dismiss certain people and then treat other people like VIPs just because they are food critics or because they, I don't know, are your regulars. You want to treat everybody with dignity. You want to give people great customer service, and I think it forces restaurants to up their game in service and to make themselves better and improve themselves because now they're getting feedback from 500 directions, and if they're a good restaurant and if they have a good sense of self and understand what their mission is which is to feed people and make them happy, then within reason, they'll take that feedback and they'll improve. I think that is the best part about the social media food phenomenon.

Historically, the industry has been dominated by men and you have been at the forefront of producing stories where women are at the center. Can you walk us through some of the challenges and then just give us some female chefs that we should be looking out for?

Yeah, that's a big question. We have come a long way. When I was cooking, when I was a line cook in my early twenties in New York City, I was the only woman. I was the only female in both kitchens that I cooked in and was the only female in a lot of the work that I did, let alone seeing people of color. It was really an area that was in need of vast damage control, vast reset, reorg, and it was very inaccessible to a lot of minorities. 

In the last 20, 30 years, there has been huge changes, especially in the last, really, eight years. We have seen a calling out of the kind of toxic culture that was pervasive in restaurants. Not all restaurants at all, but there was a part of restaurants that was very male dominated, and that was glamorized because it was this tough, cool space, but it was also really inaccessible and really untouchable for a lot of people and there was a lot of difficulty penetrating them, getting people access and opportunity.

So I think we've come a long way. I think now, there are a lot more women in professional kitchens and we're trying to focus a lot more on giving women not only opportunities to be in kitchens and cook in a culture that is open, accepting, honest, fair, equitable, but also the issue is having women rise to the top. Because it's one thing to be a line cook. It's another thing to give women and minorities and people of color opportunities to lead, to be managers, to be owners, to be founders, to be the people at the top of the food chain, and I do think we've come a long way, but we're not there yet.

For me, it's about finding those stories, telling those stories, and finding funding. Funding is a really big thing. Finding funding for minorities to run and own restaurants and be the face of the industry, and investing. There's still, I'm not going to get the statistic right, but there's still a big statistic of when a woman asks for funding, they get it far fewer times and at a much lower rate than when men go out for investing in the restaurant space. We've got a long way to go, but telling these stories and lifting up all the people who had traditionally been excluded from those spaces I think is the only way to do it.