A toast to Gail Simmons as she and ‘Top Chef’ simmer along

We come in praise of Gail Simmons.

A toast to her moxie and her punctiliousness. Her staying power. A high-wattage congeniality.

With “Top Chef” — the OG, game-changing food competition show, having now just entered its 20th amazing season — it bears mentioning her own Energizer Bunnyness at the judging table. In the great Canadian gallery of expats who have made themselves known on the American small screen — the Sandra Ohs and the Kiefer Sutherlands and the Nathan Fillions — she is a silent assassin. One who happens to know her umami and her al dente. Just part of the furniture, pop culture-wise.

“I don’t think of myself as very old,” the now 46-year-old Simmons said on a podcast a few years back, “but often, young people have come to me, saying, ‘I grew up on you.’ Then I think, if you’re 23, you were 13 years old … that for me seems like a blink of an eye … it’s amazing to be the godparents of a genre.”

She was there, after all, when “Top Chef” began simmering in 2006, courtesy of the Bravo network — the same year, incidentally, when Twitter was born. Shiloh Jolie-Pitt, too.

Adding girl-next-door smarts next to the chrome-domed gravitas of Tom Colicchio (Padma Lakshmi and her va-va-voom would arrive in Season 2), the Toronto-sprung Simmons helped cement what is now an undeniable institution: a show that has influenced the whims of restaurant-goers and home cooks alike, all while upping the visibility of chefs and different regions of America (they plop down in different cities every season).

Not only did it give us an entire diaspora of spinoffs around the world (there have been 29 versions) and make “Please pack your knives and go” into a television catchphrase for the ages but, even more importantly, it is a mirror, as the New York Times mused recently: “‘Top Chef’ has reflected the evolution of America’s culinary world, from the foam-crazed molecular gastronomy of the mid-2000s to the tattooed rejection of fine dining’s pretensions to the reckonings around #MeToo and workplace equity.”

This latest season just started, and as diehards know, is a delightful mash-up: with winners and finalists from various “Top Chefs” over the years (contestants stretching from Thailand to Mexico to Italy to Canada). It is also the first season to be set entirely outside the U.S., the series setting up shop in London for most of the run before it zips to Paris for the finale. (I watched the premiere and it was wonderful: gorgeously shot, but also pretty dishy in its diversity! Interesting to see how these various food cultures, and biases, rub up against each other.)

London as a setting was ideal because it is not only a thriving food hive unto itself and a gateway to Europe, but also kind of a neutral place. “It felt like an even playing field. It wasn’t like we were bringing everyone to America to be at our home-court advantage. We were all travelling … all a bit like fish out of water. But it’s English, so the language for the American audience would be easy,” is how Simmons described it in a new interview with Parade.

Moreover, Britain is not one of those countries, interestingly, that has its own spin on “Top Chef.” The country obviously has a vast ecosystem of its own food shows and cooking competitions, but not that one. In a way, that “made it even more of a level playing field for all the contestants. And also, as I said, it was quite humbling, for Tom, Padma and me to come to a place where we could really sort of be incognito and take nothing for granted about who we were and what we do.”

Filming in London last year turned out to be memorable in other staggering ways for Simmons and the gang: the death of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II coincided with the shoot. Lining up to observe history in motion, this Canadian posted a photo on Instagram, writing: “When the funeral procession rolls right by our @BravoTopChef London set.”

Yet another pinch-me moment for a girl from The Six, one whose palate was clearly stirred by her mother, Renee, who once ran a cooking school here out of her home and also wrote about food for the Globe and Mail.

After studying anthropology at McGill and writing herself for the likes of Toronto Life, even spending some time as a line cook, Simmons’ life took an irrevocable turn when she moved to New York and landed a job as an assistant to Vogue magazine’s resident foodie Jeffrey Steingarten, which parlayed into a “special events manager” job with world-renowned chef Daniel Boulud. Later — voila — “Top Chef”!

A marriage and two kids later — plus a 2012 memoir called “Talking With My Mouth Full: My Life as a Professional Eater” — Simmons recently became an American citizen (primarily, so she could vote and participate in the civic process, as she told the ladies of “The View” last week). She remains, however, an unabashed Canadian — never more so, perhaps, when she talks about Montreal bagels or, well, Coffee Crisp, “quite possibly the best candy bar of all time,” as she has said.

Considering that Instagram was not even a thing when “Top Chef” first began it is wild to see the endurance of this show. The lark that became the golden standard. Bored? Not our Gail.

“I’m tempted by everything,” as she likes to say. “My husband makes fun of me because every day it’s a new food that I love. I have a weakness for butterscotch pudding, ice cream in any flavour and dark chocolate, although that’s one thing I do keep in my house: 70 per cent dark chocolate.”

Shinan Govani is a Toronto-based freelance contributing columnist covering culture and society. Follow him on Twitter: @shinangovani

SHARE: