The Top Chef Mistakes Finalists Sara Bradley And Buddha Lo Wish They Never Made - Exclusive
Even great chefs make mistakes. Although Buddha Lo just won "Top Chef: World All-Stars" (his second "Top Chef" victory in a row) and Sara Bradley has placed in the finals in both seasons of the show she's appeared on, that doesn't mean they cook perfect food in every challenge. "Top Chef" is designed to be tough for even the greatest chefs, and sometimes the punishing time constraints and unfamiliar ingredients and techniques trip up fierce competitors.
In an exclusive interview with Mashed, Bradley and Lo shared the mistakes they made during "Top Chef: World All-Stars" that they really wish they could have a do-over on. Bradley's answer was perhaps obvious to people who've been following this season — she was actually eliminated after the Wellington challenge and had to fight her way back onto the show by winning "Last Chance Kitchen," so if she could, she'd take a second crack at her Wellingtons. Lo, who has shown mastery over a wide variety of cooking techniques throughout his "Top Chef" career (you don't win twice without being fundamentally sound), is still haunted by a quite basic mistake: improperly-cooked rice he served during the thali challenge.
The chefs explain their mistakes
Sara Bradley's near-fatal error was the result of a simple oversight. As she told us, she and her teammate Amar Santana "made this huge prep list and we assigned everybody tasks ... and we forgot to assign who was going to roll the Wellingtons." This crucial misstep caused the team to serve a catastrophically undercooked lamb Wellington to the judges.
If she could, she would also go back in time and serve a different dish for the Quickfire Challenge of that same episode. Her Asian-inspired five-spice cabbage did not go over well with guest judge Andrew Wong, who, in her words, "railed me. He reamed me. He was so unimpressed." She regrets going outside of her culinary identity with that dish: "I don't know why I chose to do that. Maybe in my head, I saw the steamer basket, so therefore the steamer baskets are Asian, so I need to go that way. I don't know what happened."
As for Buddha Lo, he was disturbed by messing up rice because "if it's something so basic like rice and you stuff it up and you go home for that, you're going to have to live with that for a very, very long time." He wouldn't mind getting sent home for a dish he was proud of, but making such a simple error drove him crazy. Once he realized his rice wasn't right, it affected his performance in the rest of the challenge too: "Within two minutes of finding out that my rice on the bottom was not good, I'm getting frazzled, so I missed the curry on Padma [Lakshmi]'s dish as well."
If you want to catch up with "Top Chef: World-Stars," the entire season (and every season of "Top Chef") can be streamed on Peacock.