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By <\/span>Kim Severson<\/span><\/p>\n Reporting from Milwaukee and New York City<\/p>\n One day last week, a vase spilling over with white lilies and roses arrived in Kristen Kish\u2019s dressing room in Milwaukee, where \u201cTop Chef\u201d is shooting its 21st season.<\/p>\n Padma Lakshmi, the model and author who became a household name during the 17 years she hosted the cooking-competition show, had sent them, along with a note: \u201cBreak a leg. I\u2019m so proud of you kiddo!\u201d<\/p>\n For Ms. Kish, who was so nervous her first day on the set as Ms. Lakshmi\u2019s replacement that she thought she might throw up, the flowers were a balm.<\/p>\n \u201cI know my job is to simply be me,\u201d Ms. Kish said, \u201cbut I feel like I am not going to be impressive enough to hold my own space and follow in Padma\u2019s footsteps.\u201d<\/p>\n Truth is, the aging \u201cTop Chef\u201d franchise, which has had its share of stumbles in an increasingly crowded constellation of food shows, needs her as much as she needs it. At 39, Ms. Kish represents a third wave of chef celebrity, far removed from pioneers like Emeril Lagasse and Bobby Flay, and the generation of tattooed, mostly white kitchen bros who followed.<\/p>\n Ms. Kish is a gay Korean adoptee and a proud product of the Midwest. She hits the notes sung by culinary stars before her: She co-wrote a cookbook, opened a restaurant and makes much of her living on camera, a skill she polished on several other shows before landing the \u201cTop Chef\u201d job in July. On social media, she toggles seamlessly between charming brand promotions, food tips and sincere declarations \u2014 about love, self-care and even self-doubt \u2014 that can border on oversharing.<\/p>\n Under all her casual confidence, she says, is a foundation of crushing insecurity.<\/p>\n \u201cI have severe social anxiety and I\u2019m on television, which is wild,\u201d she said. \u201cI know I\u2019m a walking contradiction.\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s hard to buy when you see her stride onto the set with the command of a model (which she once was). The show\u2019s stylist selected heeled boots and wide pants for her tall, lean body as a way to project authority. She broke into a goofy dance one moment, then hit her mark perfectly the next. The first time she uttered, \u201cPlease pack your knives and go\u201d \u2014 the chilling phrase Ms. Lakshmi delivered when a contestant was eliminated \u2014 the crew applauded.<\/p>\n \u201cKristen is a megawatt,\u201d said Dana Cowin, the former editor in chief of Food & Wine and a \u201cTop Chef\u201d judge for seven seasons. She recently watched Ms. Kish confess her personal fears as she demonstrated how to make Korean-style corn dogs for a rapt audience at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colo. \u201cShe was just so vulnerable and open.\u201d<\/p>\n If Ms. Kish had a brand, it might be wrapped in millennial pink and laced with the ideals of a generation that values earnestness, diversity and being nice.<\/p>\n \u201cShe\u2019s been on a huge journey defining how we can be a chef in the post-celebrity-chef era and how we can think about our global community in a bigger way,\u201d said her friend Gregory Gourdet, the Portland, Ore., chef who was both a judge on the show and a finalist.<\/p>\n It all started when Ms. Kish won \u201cTop Chef" in 2013.<\/p>\n \u201cShe is completely a creature of the franchise,\u201d said Francis Lam, a frequent guest host and the vice president and editor in chief of Clarkson Potter, which published \u201cKristen Kish Cooking: Recipes and Techniques\u201d in 2017. \u201cOn some level she can be a little bit of a cipher. People can put a lot on her based on their assumptions.\u201d<\/p>\n When Ms. Lakshmi announced that she would not renew her contract as the show\u2019s host and executive producer, Ms. Kish was the clear choice, said Casey Kriley, a chief executive of Magical Elves, the unscripted-production company that created the show. Executives at NBCUniversal, which owns Bravo, the network it airs on, never interviewed anyone else, said Ryan Flynn, a senior vice president.<\/p>\n \u201cShe checks all the boxes,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Ms. Kish got word that \u201cTop Chef\u201d wanted her while flying back to the East Coast with her wife, Bianca Dusic, after doing promotional work for a hotel in Thailand.<\/p>\n \u201cI was shocked,\u201d she said. \u201cI really wasn\u2019t pushing for this because I never thought it was actually a possibility.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Lakshmi was the first person she called. \u201cI hope I\u2019ve been a sounding board for her over the last decade,\u201d Ms. Lakshmi wrote in an email. \u201cI\u2019ve made it my mission to mentor young women like her because I didn\u2019t have that coming up.\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Lakshmi, a victim of sexual assault, often spoke out about sexual harassment in the restaurant industry, including accusations against a \u201cTop Chef\u201d winner, and pushed to make the show less Eurocentric.<\/p>\n Ms. Kish said that although she will have no problem being blunt if she needs to, she intends to focus on the work, not the politics.<\/p>\n \u201cTV is populated by people who love to hear their own voice,\u201d said Hugh Acheson, a chef who made his name with restaurants in Georgia and was a judge on the show for six seasons. \u201cAnd that isn\u2019t Kristen at all.\u201d<\/p>\n Tom Colicchio, the chef who serves as the show\u2019s head judge, said he was excited to have someone new in the mix, especially an experienced chef. \u201cShe knows what she\u2019s doing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Gail Simmons, the show\u2019s other judge and a close friend of Ms. Kish, didn\u2019t think she needed much advice: \u201cThe only concern I had was her own self-doubt.\u201d<\/p>\n A precise and focused cook with French and Italian influences, Ms. Kish has long relied on organization to counter her anxiety. Growing up in a suburb of Grand Rapids, Mich., she kept a whiteboard in her room to keep track of her schoolwork, piano lessons and sports. Her older brother, Jonathan, an automotive engineer, gave her a cordless vacuum as a housewarming present when she recently moved to Connecticut with the Australian-born Ms. Dusic. She uses it every day she\u2019s home.<\/p>\n Ms. Kish is much looser about what she eats and wears. She prefers hoodies and a ball cap turned backward. Her favorite cosmetic is Carmex. She\u2019d just as soon eat chicken tenders, sour candy and squares of presliced Colby-Jack cheese on a saltine.<\/p>\n The Hamburger Helper that brought her joy as a child inspired a pasta dish of curly edged mafaldine tossed with mushrooms and pearl onions that is popular at her Austin restaurant, Arlo Grey.<\/p>\n This baffles her mother, Judy Kish. \u201cI truly did not use Hamburger Helper very often,\u201d she said during a recent family interview on Zoom. \u201cI really don\u2019t understand why it\u2019s so vivid in her memory, to tell you the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n The elder Ms. Kish was a high school teacher, and her husband, Michael, was an engineer at a company that made corrugated cardboard boxes. In 1984, the couple adopted the four-month-old Kristen, who had been abandoned shortly after birth at a clinic outside Seoul.<\/p>\n They strove to keep her connected to her birth country, making sure she tasted kimchi, introducing her to a Korean exchange student and reading her \u201cThe Korean Cinderella\u201d by Shirley Climo. <\/em>(Ms. Kish had the story spray-painted on the restroom walls of her restaurant. Speakers softly play a recording of a woman reading it in Korean.)<\/p>\n For a long time, Ms. Kish tried not to think about her Korean roots. \u201cI put it aside because I was scared that I was going to find out something that I didn\u2019t want to find out about where I actually came from,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n Still, in her 20s, she had her Korean name and adoption case number inked on her wrist \u2014 the first of many tattoos marking important moments in her life.<\/p>\n After she won \u201cTop Chef,\u201d she vowed to use some of the $125,000 prize money to visit South Korea, but couldn\u2019t go through with it. Nine years later, Netflix sent her to Seoul on a five-day promotional trip tied to her work as a host on \u201cIron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend.\u201d She didn\u2019t search out orphanages, as some adoptees do. Instead, she focused on learning about the food.<\/p>\n Can someone who didn\u2019t grow up in a Korean family legitimately cook the cuisine? It\u2019s a question she grapples with.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m trying to own that side of me so it doesn\u2019t feel like I\u2019m appropriating a culture that doesn\u2019t belong to me,\u201d she said. \u201cI clearly can have a point of view about Korean American food. There is a connection. I\u2019m allowed to explore it. But for a long time I felt guilty about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Despite her shyness as a child, she had a lot of friends. By high school she was firmly ensconced with the preps.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had Abercrombie clothes, and I had purple contacts,\u201d she said. \u201cI was trying to be everything except me. I wanted to hide.\u201d<\/p>\n Especially, she said, her budding attraction to women.<\/p>\n Her grades weren\u2019t good enough to get into Michigan State University, where her brother and both her parents graduated. She spent a year at Grand Valley State University, but didn\u2019t go back. Her parents, who said she always had a creative streak with food, sent her to Chicago to attend Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts. She loved it and graduated, but also discovered cocaine and the bars.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of it was trying to mask and self-medicate my social anxiety and my sexuality,\u201d she said. Ms. Kish convinced herself that being successful couldn\u2019t include being gay.<\/p>\n She kept partying, turning down jobs she thought were beneath her. Finally, her parents stopped paying for her nice apartment. She moved back home, depressed and defeated.<\/p>\n They gave her one more chance. They knew of a room for rent in Boston, and offered to help pay for it if she found a job within three weeks.<\/p>\n She did, cooking in a series of kitchens that led to a job at Stir, a cookbook store and demonstration kitchen owned by the chef and restaurateur Barbara Lynch. Ms. Lynch became a mentor, passing her name to producers who had called looking for new \u201cTop Chef\u201d contestants.<\/p>\n Ms. Lynch wrote a letter that Ms. Kish had in her back pocket when she won. \u201cSo very proud of you,\u201d it read. \u201cBreathe and most of all enjoy the experience!!\u201d<\/p>\n Ms. Kish doesn\u2019t have much to say about recent reports that Ms. Lynch verbally and physically harassed workers at her restaurants.<\/p>\n \u201cI had been removed from her company for 10 years, so I don\u2019t know,\u201d Ms. Kish said. \u201cWhat I do know is that if she never said, \u2018Kristen, you can win Top Chef,\u2019 none of this would be happening. And that\u2019s a fact.\u201d<\/p>\n Over a cheeseburger at Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan last month, Ms. Kish pondered how to navigate her fast-rising fame. She guards the name of the town where she lives, and is careful what she says when she\u2019s out somewhere, because people eavesdrop. She is trying to get better at responding to the strangers who approach her in places like the supermarket.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I get insecure and uncomfortable and socially anxious, I kind of become, for lack of a better term, a bitch,\u201d Ms. Kish said. Ms. Dusic prompts her to snap out of it with a code phrase: \u201cNasty Nancy\u2019s here.\u201d<\/p>\n The two met when Ms. Dusic was the corporate executive assigned to help Ms. Kish open her Austin restaurant in the LINE Hotel in 2018. After six months of intense work side by side, they shared a high-five that lasted a little longer than they expected.<\/p>\n They were married in their backyard in April 2021. As with their engagement, Ms. Kish announced it on Instagram.<\/p>\n Ms. Dusic, 44, left the restaurant industry when the stress of working during the Covid shutdowns and grief over her father\u2019s death from cancer made her sick. Now she is a \u201cmind-set and transformation coach" who offers breath work and other therapies, which she uses to help Ms. Kish. She also has persuaded Ms. Kish to stop ordering so much takeout.<\/p>\n Ms. Dusic frequently accompanies Ms. Kish when she works. At home, they putter in the garden, drink tea and are in bed by 10 p.m. It\u2019s all about managing a life that just keeps getting bigger.<\/p>\n \u201cThis was never the plan,\u201d Ms. Kish said. \u201cThe plan would have been for me to just work in a little restaurant, making ends meet, doing my life and just keep trucking along.\u201d<\/p>\n![](\"https:\/\/static01.nyt.com\/images\/2023\/08\/22\/multimedia\/22kish2-hqpf\/22kish2-hqpf-articleLarge.jpg\")
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Under Control<\/span><\/h3>\n
An Education in Fame<\/span><\/h3>\n