Gail Simmons | How to Find Your Passion from a Top Chef Judge & Co-Host of The Good Dish
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Good things happen when you trust yourself and head in the direction of things you are passionate about. Top Chef judge Gail Simmons’ shares insights from her career journey including how to navigate life’s challenging moments while integrating excitement into your life. Great takeaways ahead plus fantastic top Chicago restaurant recommendations you don’t want to miss.
Key Takeaways from This Episode
Four helpful tips on how to figure out your life destination
Ways to inject fun into your job
Key components that are common among people who win in any situation
Effective stress-management tips to overcome intense moments
Culinary destination recommendations in Chicago
Disclaimer: All information and views shared on the Live Greatly podcast are purely the opinions of the authors, and are not intended to provide medical advice or treatment recommendations. The contents of this podcast are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Always seek the guidance of your physician or other qualified health professionals when you have any questions regarding your specific health, changes to diet and exercise, or any medical conditions.
Resources Mentioned In This Episode
About Gail Simmons
Gail Simmons is a trained culinary expert, food writer, and dynamic television personality. Since the show’s inception in 2006, she has lent her expertise as a permanent judge on BRAVO’s Emmy and James Beard Award-winning series Top Chef, now in its 19th successful season. She is a co-host of The Good Dish, the new daily syndicated series offering delicious recipes, real-life wisdom, and conversations on the topics of the day, and most recently was the host of Top Chef Amateurs, as well as Iron Chef Canada. From 2004 to 2019, Gail served as special projects director at FOOD & WINE.
In February 2012, she published her first book, Talking With My Mouth Full: My Life as a Professional Eater. Her first cookbook, Bringing It Home: Favorite Recipes from a Life of Adventurous Eating, was released in October 2017. Nominated for an IACP award for the best general cookbook, it features recipes inspired by Gail’s world travels—all made with accessible ingredients and intelligent, simple techniques for successful family meals and easy entertaining.
Gail frequently appears on other daytime television shows, such as TODAY on NBC, Rachael Ray, and The Talk, and was named the #1 Reality TV Judge in America by The New York Post.
She is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Babson College, co-founder of Bumble Pie Productions, and the newest Global Ambassador for Children in Conflict, an international organization committed to protecting, educating, and providing critical aid for the world's most vulnerable children affected by war. Gail sits on the board of several other nonprofit organizations and philanthropic endeavors, including City Harvest and Hot Bread Kitchen. She currently lives in New York City with her husband, Jeremy, and their two children, Dahlia and Kole.
Connect with Gail
Website: Gail Simmons
Instagram: @gailsimmonseats
Kristel Bauer, the Founder of Live Greatly, is on a mission to help people thrive personally and professionally. She is a corporate wellness expert, Integrative Medicine Fellow, Keynote Speaker, TEDx speaker & contributing writer for Entrepreneur.
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Episode Transcript
Kristel (Guest’s Introduction)
If you're looking to feel inspired, you're going to love today's episode with Gail Simmons. Gail is a culinary expert, food writer, and dynamic television personality. She's one of the judges on Bravo's Emmy and James Beard Award-winning series Top Chef now in its 19th successful season. I've been watching that show for such a long time, and I always love watching Gail and I was so excited to sit down with her and talk about her experiences.
She's also the co-host of The Good Dish and she's published two books: Talking with My Mouth Full: My Life as a Professional Eater and her cookbook Bringing it Home: Favorite Recipes From a Life of Adventurous Eating. I'm so excited to share this episode with you, let's jump into it and welcome Gail to the show.
Gail:
Thank you. I'm pleased to be talking to you.
Kristel:
Amazing. So to start, I would love for you to share some of the things that you're currently up to. You're doing a lot of really, really interesting things. And I've been watching you for a long time because my husband and I started watching Top Chef way back in the day, and now you're doing even more things.
So we'd love to hear a little bit about that.
Gail:
I used to say that like Top Chef, we used to be the trailblazers, and now we're sort of the grandparents of food television, we have been on for a long time. I don't take that lightly. It's an accomplishment that I'm really proud of, but it's true. I've been on television a long time.
I feel very lucky that life has given me this opportunity. What am I doing now? A lot of things currently, Top Chef is in its 19th season and it's on the air. We shot it back in the fall in Houston, Texas, and it's airing now every Thursday night at 8:00 PM, seven central on Bravo. So a lot of my time is still spent, even though we've already shot the whole show, doing press and promotion, obviously like posting about all the amazing things we did in Houston and all the episodes I started in January with my co-host Daphne Oz and Jamika Pessoa, uh, two very good girlfriends who have been working with me on a version of The Good Dish. It used to be called The Dish on Oz for over two years. And in December we learned that we had the opportunity to make it its own spinoff, full hour of daytime television, which is a huge thing because those opportunities do not come along very often.
And we shot many, many episodes very quickly, we dove right in and that show is on the air every day. Monday to Friday, you can check your local listings for the time, but it's really, you know, nationally across the country airing, um, in different channels, in every different market. But you can catch us cooking and figuring out what to make for dinner.
And it's kind of a combination show of like, obviously everything through the lens of food and cooking, but really geared at the home cook across the country. All of us need to answer that question every single day, what's for dinner. And we do that for you. But we also talk about the stories of the day and the trends.
We break down, all of those social media crazy food trends either in recipes or in flavors or combinations, and figuring out what works and what doesn't so you don't have to. We do a lot of things, testing recipes from around the country, bringing in ingredients that maybe you haven't brought into your own pantry. Um, and, um, you know, really just having a very authentic conversation around food and cooking from three moms who do it every single day.
Kristel:
Right. Amazing. Well, you sound to me like you have the dream job, you get to eat really amazing food, right? I'm sure like everything else, you know, there's good days and bad days, but you know, when you were doing more traveling, you got to travel, you get to try people's amazing cooking. And that is bringing me to wanting to talk about your first book.
Because your first book, Talking with My Mouth Full, when I was reading the little description of that you shared how I think our graduating college, or maybe you were trying to figure out what to do.
Gail:
College.
Kristel:
College. Okay. Got it. And you were trying to figure out like what to do. And a little snippet that was shared was so inspiring to me that I really want to touch on it. And it was how you were able to kind of navigate to get to where you are now. So I would love for you to share a little bit about that.
Gail:
Sure. Like so many young people graduate in college. I got a really great education. I feel very privileged that I was able to go to an amazing college. I grew up in Canada and I went to McGill University.
Which is an extraordinary school, you know, in Montreal, in the center of downtown Montreal, which I believe is one of the greatest cities in the world, especially for food. It's an incredibly rich cultural city. It's a French city and my mother was from Montreal. So I had a lot of family there. So I spent four years there having the time of my life and I learned a lot, but I did not learn anything that prepared me to like go to the outside world and get an actual job.
And I can only imagine how hard that is these days. But when I graduated college, I felt pretty lost and almost my girlfriends. And I have still have many of the same friends as I did back then, they all seemed really focused and directed. They all knew exactly what they wanted to be.
I'm going to be a lawyer. I'm going to go get a master's degree in business or in art history. I'm going to be a social worker. I'm going to go to med school or dentistry. And I, Lynette when we went around the room, and everyone kind of said what they're doing when they graduate. I was like, I really have no idea. All I know is I loved to cook.
I love to cook. I like to write, I love eating. I'm a really good eater. Um, but of course, that doesn't get you a job necessarily. Doesn't give you practical skills or didn't think it did anyway. Um, so I moved back home with my parents after college, into the basement of the house I grew up in and my mom was sort of worried about me.
I was floundering a little bit. I didn't have much direction. I was panicked because I'm pretty like Type A person, and I'm like, you know, I was a really good student and it was sort of troubling, I guess, to my mom that I'd come out of this, uh, four years of higher education without much direction. And so she sat me down with her, one of her best friend's daughters who was about, she's probably about six or eight years, my senior. And so she was probably in her late twenties at the time, early thirties, and seemed to have it all together.
She was a producer. She actually became an executive at the Food Network in Canada and was an executive television executive for many, many years still is. And she sat me down and was like, okay, well, let's talk about what you think you want to do. Why don't you take a piece of paper and do this little exercise for me? Just write down what you like to do, don't worry about it being a job. Because I was so stressed out about the fact that like all the things I liked, weren't actual jobs and they weren't gonna do anything for me.
And so she was like, forget about that for a minute. Just write down what you love to do, what you think you're really good at. And on that piece of paper, I wrote four words. I wrote eat, write, travel, and cook. And I sort of laughed when I was writing them because I thought she would laugh at them and she looked at it and surprisingly, she said, okay, so what's the problem.
Like, what's your, mom's so worried about, like, that sounds great to me. You have direction, you know exactly what you want to do. Let's just go do it. Let's figure out a way for you to do it. And that's sort of the, I guess, the approval I needed to take those thoughts that I've been having about my feelings about the world of food and food media and writing, and cooking and eating for a living. The approval I needed to go forth and actually try to do it because it was definitely an alternative job.
It sounded very unconventional at the time. Keep in mind that this was 24 years ago, maybe in context. And so, wow, that makes me feel really old. But long before social media. Okay. This was like, there was no social media at the time, really. There was definitely no Twitter, no Instagram, no TikTok, no Snapchat. There was like maybe the pivots, the beginning of the internet, there was like blogs, but the world of like food blogs was definitely not a thing that I followed okay to have the career.
There weren't podcasts. There wasn't any of this. Right. Digital, digital anything. Media, food media to me meant magazines, right? Meant newspapers and magazines. That's what the media was when I said, I wanted to be in food media. When I put that eat and write and cook together, that was food media.
And to me, food media, it was like going to work for like a glossy food publication or possibly the back of a woman's magazine or maybe the dining section, which was like small, especially in Canada of a newspaper. And so I decided to give it a try and figure out a way to do it. And it allowed me to then look for jobs where I can go in that direction.
And the first job I got was as an intern at the biggest city magazine in Toronto, sort of like New York Magazine or LA Magazine, um, called Toronto Life, a really excellent magazine. And I got an internship there for four months and I didn't really know what I'd be doing, but it was with a magazine that I loved that I read that I respected and I did everything there. I learned to fact-check, I learned to research, I learned how to make them, you know, what goes into making a magazine, both on the editorial side and on the publishing side. And I loved it and I became very close to the food editor there and the restaurant critic who was an incredible writer, an excellent long-time veteran of the food industry in Toronto, one of the three or four really big names in food media at that time.
And they let me sort of tag along on their adventures. They would take me to lunch when they were viewing restaurants or they would let me read and help edit and fact-check the monthly food column or the restaurant reviews. And that was where I really got a taste for what being in food media really meant.
And, you know, I was sort of hooked and it led me, you know, over the course of the next 20 years to obviously what I do now, which I could have never have imagined because food media now means so many other things and I never saw them coming.
Kristel:
Wow. Okay.
So I absolutely love that. And I feel like everyone listening should take a moment and write down those four things and think about how they can incorporate that more into their life, into their career.
Because, you know, as you said, like it was something that came so simply to you and you just needed that permission. Like, oh, you can actually do something with these four things that you really love. So sometimes that permission, I think, needs to come from ourselves. Like we can add this in. Maybe it doesn't need to be your, you know, your full-time job, but there are ways that people can integrate those passions and things that gets you excited into your life.
Because sometimes when life gets busy, you can forget those things and they might take, you know, they’re not as front and center.
Gail:
Giving yourself permission to think more creatively about what you love to do, whether or not it is what's considered a conventional job gets more difficult, right? It's difficult to sit back and not think of like, okay, what's a career, what's a job.
Do I like accounting? No one likes accounting. People are really good at it. I'm not saying no one likes accounting. I'm exaggerating obviously, but that's not your creative passion, right? People can be great mathematicians, they can be excellent at business, they can, but it's harder to step back and say, okay, well, what's my passion.
Let's put all of the conventional wisdom of like what makes a good job aside and think a bit creatively out of the box about what I'm passionate about, what excites me, and start there as a path. And I understand that comes with a lot of privilege in a lot of ways, the fact that I could take that internship and get paid very little and live in my parents' basement for the first year of my career was amazing that I was given that opportunity, but at the same time, I certainly then, you know, that led me to quitting. You know, I went on from that magazine to work for a newspaper for a while, um, again, in the food and entertainment section. And when I realized that food was really my gig, I took a leap of faith, quit the job, moved to New York City, and enrolled in culinary school full time.
And that, and that's really set me off on what I do today. And. You know, I thought I was going to New York for a year and to go to culinary school. And that was 22 years ago and I never came home, but I spent a lot of time between then and what I do now, working in kitchens, putting my head down, working really hard at very, in many ways, thankless jobs, where I wasn't just eating and drinking glamorously, you know, all day long, I was learning the ropes and it was almost a 10-year journey before I really got to a place where I felt like I had reached that point in my career where I was really doing what I set out to do 10 years earlier.
And it's evolving every day and still changing. And, but I still, those four words are still kind of at the, at the root of what I do.
Kristel:
You know what though? I think, you know, it wasn't always a walk in the park is kind of what you're saying, are those challenges and you got to put in the time and the effort. But I have found that if you're doing something you really love that it's more of a fun journey. Like it's, you don't mind putting in the time, you're excited about putting in the time.
And that's something I've experienced with what I've been doing in the past couple of years with my show and with everything else, it's been fun, but it takes time to, as you said, to get things really going.
Gail:
But it still works, right? Like that's why it's called work and not play. It is still work. There are many days when a lot of the nitty-gritty of what I do is rigorous and challenging. And I don't want to wake up and face the day to do it because it's not fun and games. It's hard work. And there's a lot of menial pieces to it. There's a lot like any job, a job is a job. That's why it's called a job. Again, it's not playtime, but at the same time to your point, the fact that it all is through the lens of something I'm so passionate about, makes it a lot more uh, tolerable to you know, pun intended makes it certainly easier to swallow, right?
Kristel:
Got it. So it's not all like travel and eating amazing food all the time.
So I would love to segue a little bit into talking about some of the things that you've noticed, maybe some key components or traits that you found in some of the contestants on Top Chef that have been really successful because success is, um, you know, there's not one way to, to be successful by any means.
And I think it's a very individualized thing, but when you're in these high-pressure situations, and if you're doing a TV competition with these challenges, I mean, oh my gosh, they seem so intense and stressful, even as like the viewer, I'm
like, whoo!
Gail:
Yeah, even more than you imagine even more on television.
Kristel:
So I'm curious, you know, I'm sure someone can be an amazing chef, but that doesn't necessarily mean that's going to come through in that type of competition.
So I would love to hear if you've noticed any, as I said, common traits in the people who've really been able to do really well on those types of competitions.
Gail:
Sure, yes I have. People ask me all the time in the beginning of who's going to win Top Chef. Not necessarily asking if it's been rigged, excuse me. Um, not meaning if it's a rig, because it's never even close to rigged. I think of, I don't think any of the shows are, but our show especially is we are so puritanical about the way we do business on Top Chef and having been on at least a handful of other food shows over the years. Um, I can tell you how rigorous our set is, how seriously our crew and, you know, our head judge Hunk Leo takes the quality of what we do, and that has really kept us on a straight path in terms of how the show is judged, thankfully.
And I think that's why it has the integrity and the track record that it does. But people are often asking just that first day when they cook that first dish, can you point out who's going to win right away? Because they're so much better than everyone else. The answer is no, not a chance. I can never tell you who's going to win because our show does not depend on just you being the best cook in the room.
That's not what it's about. And there's no one way to measure it, per your question. Um, what I can tell on that per se is who the strongest cooks are by far, but that never means that they're going to make it to the end. Our show, the most stringent rule of Top Chef is you are only judged on what you made that day and what you serve us, and what's in front of us in that specific challenge.
So it doesn't matter what you made yesterday and it doesn't matter what you might have the potential to make tomorrow. That's not a fair way to judge anything. It doesn't matter that you won five challenges to that point, you screw up one day and you're gone similar to the fact imagine it the same way as if I was a customer in a restaurant. And if I know that this restaurant has four stars from the New York times, that's great. But if I come and sit at the table and have a terrible meal, I don't care that every food critic in town has said that, that, that, that restaurant's amazing. I'm not going back, and I'm pretty pissed about the fact that I paid $500 for my meal, right?
And we judge every challenge under that light. So measuring success and the type of chef on Top Chef, I've noticed a lot of things. There are many types of cooks, right? And that doesn't mean that they're better or worse than each other.
There's many ways that a cook processes, the same way, that there's many ways that anyone gets to the answer to any specific problem. Well, we give them a challenge and obstacle that they have to overcome. Everyone goes out in a different way. There are some chefs who are really great spontaneous cooks in two minutes.
They know how to grab their ingredients and just start cooking and trust themselves that it's going to come together. There's other chefs that are kind of more methodical in their process and they could be a way better cook technically than the chef was really spontaneous, but they need a longer process.
So the quickfires aren't for them because they often need to make a recipe five times in five different ways before they get to the final one. And that's fine when you're working in a kitchen in a restaurant and you can like test a recipe. You don't need to put it on the menu until you made it 500 ways from Tuesday and it protected it, and it's a place where you want.
But on our show, especially in the quick part that doesn't fly and you often don't know what kind of cook you are until you get there and are put under the really intense circumstances that we put them in. And as hard as it looks on camera when you see that finished product from television, it's 20 times harder when you're actually there, there is not a chef who's come off of top chef who hasn't said to me, and I don't care if they've been first off or if they've won the whole season, there is not a chef who hasn't said that was way harder than it looks on television. That was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.
And it really is in a million ways. It is an incredible test professionally. It's a test of your skill, obviously, as a cook, as a leader, as a chef, your technical skills, it is also a huge mental and emotional test. Putting them in the circumstances that we put them in, isolating them away from their restaurants, from their families, without access to the outside world. That all weighs in on how well you cook every day and how you show up for work and the stamina.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. You know what I mean? You do it all. The quickfire seems like a sprint. But then that three hours later, you're starting to cook your elimination challenge dish, and then you do the elimination challenge. And the next day you do a quickfire again, and you do that for two months straight.
So it is incredibly rigorous. And then you're kind of left alone with your thoughts for hours at a time while you're in the stew room. And we're making decisions about your fate.
The other thing that I think is worth mentioning in that process for the success of chefs on our show is that to us, it's a game, right? To us, it’s a television show. To me as the judge, it's my job. I show up every day, but then I get to go home at night to my, or go out for dinner later or go back to my family. And for the viewer, it's just an hour of entertainment every Thursday, but to the chef tour and it is their livelihood, right? This isn't, we don't have people on our show who think it would be fun to be cooked.
We have people only on our show who are 10 years last professionals at this stage, it's their livelihood. It's what they do every day when the cameras are off, this show will determine whatever they do for the future of their careers. It can escalate them to huge acclaim as it has done for so many chefs on our show.
But it could also, if you don't present yourself well and kind of prove your, your skill and who you are as a person, you can go really poorly. So if there's a lot of pressure that I think we all don't think about in those moments too, and they also are big Factors in the success of a contestant on the show.
Kristel:
Wow. Okay. So do you have any thoughts on like some great stress management tips for people in those situations? I mean, I have my whole list from my training. I'm just curious, have you seen people like effectively do something that works in those really intense moments?
Gail:
I think nerves get the best of you. We say on the show, it's a cliche, but it's true.
Like the clock is not your friend. That is the hardest thing about any show like ours, and it's so true in the Top Chef kitchen that time goes so fast when it's limited, right? When you have an hour to produce something and that kind of pressure can trip you up completely. So I think it's important as it is in life to stop, to take a minute, to form a plan, and to follow that plan.
Because if you just start firing without a plan, this goes from me, I'm saying this myself and let them saying it to the Top Chef contestants and them, you get halfway through and you have no idea what direction you're going in and it's not going to come together. At least not for me with anything in life, whether it's cooking or you know, planning your future. Could be anything.
So taking that moment, even though it eats into your clock, those five minutes or three minutes, even to stop, process, and make a plan, I need to write things down personally. And I know a lot of our chefs do too. They sit with their notebooks and they make a plan.
Okay, this is what I have to do. This is the challenge. What is the challenge? Here is my challenge. What do I need? Here's my idea. What are the four steps I need to get to get from A to B? Write it down, follow it. Second-guessing is also really hard. We all do that, right? We all second guess ourselves I'm so easily distracted and deterred by the outside world because I don't follow my instincts under pressure sometimes.
And I think that on Top Chef, especially, again, these are professionals who've been in the kitchen for a long time. They're all amazing cooks, right? We don't have a show. We did in the early, early years that our show is. It's not a, what's the word like backed with some terrible cooks, meant to fail and some who are raked.
They are all executive chefs to chef, chef to cuisines. At this point, they're all running their own restaurants. They are all at the top of their careers and about to take that big leap to that next level. So they all know what they're doing. We don't get terrible food on top of that very often.
So it's not about if they're capable of doing it, every chef who makes it from the 10,000 applications, every season to the 15 people on the show, they're all capable of these challenges. We don't put anything in front of them that we know they aren't capable of doing. It's about how they react in the moment, manage their stress, and execute on it, right?
So second-guessing yourself because all of a sudden there's eight cameras on you and you see what the person next to you is doing. And you're looking at the clock and it's tuck ticking and ticking, and all of a sudden you wanted to use artichokes, but maybe that's not a good idea because can you get them cooked in time?
And I don't know if I can do it, but I thought I could do it, but then that person's doing artichokes. So maybe I shouldn't do artichokes. All play them. Um, and that's a major stress factor, and I think that's something we all need to think about in life too, right? Second-guessing yourself and making a plan and like sticking to your instincts, trusting your gut.
It's a huge, hard thing to do in life, but I truly believe that it's important.
Kristel:
Yeah, no, that, those are amazing tips. And this is a good time, I think, to talk a little bit about your cookbook. And I would love to hear a little bit about that. And then we are going to be coming to the end where I do like a fun, quick wellness, lightning round.
Gail:
Um, my cookbook, where to start, it's called Bringing it Home: Favorite Recipes From a Life of Adventurous Eating. And it's really an amalgamation of over a hundred recipes that I learned through my entire life, like starting in childhood. Many of the recipes are recipes from my travels, especially over the last 20 years as a professional.
A lot are inspired by the mentors I've had along the way. Chefs I've had the privilege of working with, both on Top Chef and in, you know, I worked for Food Wine Magazine for 15 years before that I worked for some incredible like icons in the industry. I was very lucky. I worked for Daniel Ballou for several years.
I worked for Jeffrey Steingarten, we’d critique at Vogue Magazine and I had some amazing travels that I was really lucky enough to enjoy. And from everything I do, whether it's a person who inspires me or a travel destination that I've been lucky enough to visit, I always take them home with me, right?
Whether it's something to bring to my pantry, a new spice, a recipe tip, a dish I saw that I want to bring home with my own life. And I often do, and I bring those recipes home and I play with them and I make them my own. And I understand them. And uh, learn to, you know, understand them, but also a big piece of that is learning the cultural context of those recipes. Why they matter to the culture where I learned them and who made them and understanding and giving credit to that culture.
So the recipes are, you know, they run the gamut, breakfast, lunch, dinner, drinks, dessert, but all from the places and people in my life, who've made an impact on me and allowed me to have the career that I have.
Kristel:
Sounds amazing. So I would love to know Gail, do you ever travel to Chicago? Cause I'm in the Chicago area. I would love to know if you have any favorite restaurants around here.
Gail:
Yes! Of course, I do. Well, I was actually supposed to be in Chicago this June, but unfortunately, my plans had to change, so I'm not going to be there. I haven't been to Chicago since the pandemic, but in general, I get to Chicago probably once a year in normal times, at least we shot season four of Top Chef in Chicago and I've returned so many times for whether it was the James Beard Awards or for other work I've done. I have a few really close friends there, of course. And Chicago is obviously one of the great culinary destinations in America. It is for so many reasons, such as a great midpoint in American food culture, where the, it's Midwestern. I don't know why they call it Western cause by Western, but that's a whole other topic. I'm from Canada, so the geography of America is still kind of new to me, but it really is a center point in this country where so many great chefs and food cultures have come together. And so it has produced one of the greatest chefs in the country and not by cold night, you know, not by coincidence.
Obviously, a lot of Top Chef contestants who have been our most successful is many of our winners. So there's, I mean, there's so many restaurants that I love visiting when I'm there. I couldn't possibly think of them all. I mean, obviously what comes to mind are a lot of them, people from Top Chef who have gone on to really be the top chefs of Chicago, people like Stephanie Izard and Sarah Grueneberg who's I love her restaurant so much and I love her.
Beverly Kim, a finalist from season nine, I believe who has Parachutes. Yeah. She's an incredible force in our industry. And I actually sit on the board of her nonprofit, which is called the Abundance Setting, which works with, with mothers who are working in restaurants and how to support them and get them better self-care. So an interesting person to talk to on the wellness front, for sure.
But also Joe Flamm, who just opened Rosemary's. He was our winner of season 14, 16, 18. I can't keep it straight. He's amazing. He's one of my favorite human beings. And then obviously so many greats from Rick Bayless to Grant Achatz. Chicago just goes on and on and on.
There's also a lot of really amazing women restaurants there in Chicago. I actually have, let me do something. Give me one second, because I have an amazing, I was just working on a project that allowed me to do a really deep dive in Chicago. And I hadn't done that in a really long time. Give me one second to pull it up.
Kristel:
We're starting to venture out again.
You know, I felt like we were all indoors for so long. Not really going out and not going out to eat that now, I’m just like excited to be back out there and trying new food and trying new restaurants and getting back out there and socializing again.
Gail:
I'm with you. I feel the same. And it's just fantastic that I finally feel like I'm able to do that too and go out. I mean, you know, I'm always trying to support restaurants locally, nationally. I feel like, you know, I'm not a chef. And I say this often, I'm not a chef. I'm a professional, culinary professional, but I'm really like a champion. I'm a cheerleader for the restaurant industry.
And that's what I feel like my job is every day. And the last couple of years has been so disheartening because I have watched powerlessly, you know, as so many of my peers and colleagues have struggled and it's great to feel like I can finally go out and visit them again. I would say, you know, obviously Monteverde, Sarah's restaurant and Beverly and Stephanie. Carrie Nahabedian who has Brindille and has been such a force, a female force in the Chicago thing world forever. I love her. Tigist Reda, who has an amazing Ethiopian restaurant in Chicago. You know, there's Diana Davila, who has Mi Tocaya, one of the best Mexican restaurants in America. She is an extraordinary cook and I adore her too and her food.
I mean, there's just, there's so many great women cooking in Chicago. So I love trying to focus on them as much.
Kristel:
Oh Gail, thank you so much. I'm going to have my team put links to all those restaurants in the episode details. So, you listening, you can check those out and I'm going to go through them too and see which ones I haven't tried that I need to go explore.
So this has been so fun Gail. I'm going to do a couple of fun, quick wellness questions, but anything that you would like to share before we get into that, I'm going to have links to your books and your social media and all of that good stuff so people can access it.
Gail:
No, I guess just, you know where to find me on television, Top Chef on Bravo Thursday, then The Good Dish, five days a week.
Kristel:
Amazing.
Okay. So fun first question for you. So you are on a desert, a desert island, and you can only bring three foods with you. What three foods would you bring?
Gail:
Dark chocolate, pasta, and tequila.
Kristel:
I love it.
Gail:
I'm hoping that the desert island has some tropical fruit to make it better.
Kristel:
There you go. Maybe make a margarita.
Okay. And then this'll, this'll be the last question. So knowing what you know today, what advice would you give to yourself from 10 years ago?
Gail:
Trust your gut, I guess. Figuratively and literally. My gut is obviously what's given me my job. But also, obviously from a, you know, a less literal point of view and perspective, just trusting myself and having faith that I love what I do.
And I have invested in myself and in the relationships that I hold dear to me, and that it's going to work out from a career perspective. And if you can sort of trust yourself and own that you are good at it, and that you're passionate at that good things will happen. It was hard to do, still is. I still tell my current self that regardless of 10 years ago.
Kristel:
I love it. Yeah. That's such incredible advice and that's perfect. Perfect way to end an awesome episode. So Gail, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.
Gail:
My pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Disclaimer:
Now for a quick disclaimer, all of the information and views shared on the Live Greatly podcast are purely the opinions of the authors. They are not medical advice or treatment recommendations. The contents of this podcast are intended for informational and educational purposes only. Always seek the guidance of your physician or qualified health professional for any recommendations specific to you or for any questions you have regarding your specific health, your sleep patterns, changes to diet and exercise, or any medical conditions.