Arts & Entertainment
Sweet!
Gail Simmons,
longtime judge on
Bravo's Top Chef,
hosts Just Desserts.
Devra Ferst
Forward
New York/JTA
E
very reality competition with
judges has a "mean one": Simon
Cowell's scathing remarks made
plenty of American Idol contestants cry.
For the first couple of seasons of Top
Chef, the Emmy Award-winning Bravo
TV series now in its seventh season, that
judge was Gail Simmons.
But behind the scenes, the personal-
ity of the vivacious and fast-talking
Simmons, who tap dances for the pro-
ducers during lulls in filming and refers
to herself as the little sister of the show,
stands in sharp contrast to her earlier
television persona.
And now she has a new role: host and
consulting producer of Just Desserts, a
Bravo show that premiered Sept. 15 and
challenges pastry chefs.
While Simmons, 34, a special projects
manager at Food and Wine magazine,
is perhaps one of the best-known food
critics in the country now, at first she
had no interest in pursuing a path in the
culinary world, let alone one on televi-
sion.
"I kind of joke that I'm not a food
critic but that I play one on TV. It has
become a self-fulfilling prophecy!'
said Simmons, whose sharp tongue
has noticeably mellowed over the past
couple of seasons of Top Chef, which
pits young, talented, fame-hungry chefs
against one another in grueling culinary
challenges. "I always loved food, but in
truth it never entered my mind as an
occupation until college!'
Few were raised in as epicurean a
48 September 30 • 2010
household as Simmons.
Her mother, Renee Simmons, wrote
a food column for the Globe and Mail,
Canada's largest newspaper, in the 1970s
and '80s, and she later opened a cooking
school in the Simmons home in Toronto.
"My mom built our kitchen as a
teaching kitchen where people can sit
around and watch you cook," Simmons
said.
Her childhood home was a fairly
traditional Jewish household, corn-
plete with hearty servings of Eastern
European Jewish food, especially for the
holidays.
"We had Shabbat dinner every Friday
night, without fail!' Simmons said.
"There was always challah and my
mother's outstanding chicken soup."
Ask Simmons about her favorite
Jewish food memories and she points to
two foods: brisket and latkes.
"My mom's brisket is killer; so are her
latkes," she said. "They're the standard
by which I will forever hold all other
briskets and latkes."
In college, Simmons shied away from
comparisons to her mom, despite cook-
ing often and reviewing restaurants for
her college newspaper.
"When you're 20 years old, the last
thing you want to hear is that you're just
like your mom!' she said.
So she pursued degrees in anthropol-
ogy and Spanish at McGill University
in Montreal and planned to work for a
nongovernmental organization in the
developing world. After graduation, feel-
ing a bit lost, Simmons took an intern-
ship at Toronto Life, a lifestyle magazine.
"I loved it; I found myself drawn to
the food editor!' she said. "And that's
when I realized, wow, there could be a
job here for me."
"We had Shabbat dinner
every Friday night, without
fail. There was always
challah and my mother's
outstanding chicken soup."
- Gail Simmons
Following stints at a couple of pub-
lications, Simmons moved to New
York to attend the Institute of Culinary
Education. After graduation, she cooked
at some of the city's most exclusive
restaurants, served as an assistant to
prominent food critic Jeffrey Steingarten
and worked as events manager for chef
Daniel Boulud's dining group before
joining the staff of Food and Wine in
2004.
In 2006, when Bravo approached
Food and Wine about a partnership for
a new show called Top Chef Simmons
was chosen to represent the magazine
as a judge. Her incisive remarks about
the dishes of "chef-testants," as they are
called on the show, earned her the title
of the "mean judge" by viewers.
Although she often followed her cri-
tiques with positive feedback, the show's
producers edited out the latter in their
effort to make each judge into a distinc-
tive character, Simmons said.
With the show well established, and
with its first spinoff, Top Chef Masters
— Simmons is a judge on a show that
features famous chefs competing against
one another in the kitchen — having
wrapped up its second season, Simmons
is finding herself on a set filming for
much of the year.
She's not complaining.
It's a "great family of people,"
Simmons said, referring to the Top Chef
crew and such co-stars as fellow judge
and celebrity chef Tom Colicchio and
cookbook author and actress/model
Padma Lakshmi, the show's host.
On Just Desserts, Simmons is spending
more time in front of and behind the
camera. She is a consulting producer for
the first time on a show in which pastry
chefs will be tested in the art of sugar
work, bread and cake baking, chocolate,
candy, maple syrup and more.
Despite her Top Chef experience,
Simmons was surprised at just how
tough her hosting role proved to be.
Hosting, she says, is "a harder job than
judging — you have to lead the plot:'
Making the job even more difficult
is the fact that as host, Simmons has to
taste each dish, sampling as many as a
dozen sugary desserts in a single show.
"I was bouncing off walls at the end
of most days," she said.
The sugar highs may come in handy:
Simmons has other projects in the works.
In addition to her position at Food
and Wine, she is partnering with AOL
for an online cooking series, and she is
hoping to write a food book soon.
But "the most gratifying thing,"
Simmons said, "is when people come up
to me and tell me that their 5-year-old
knows what a chiffonade is" — a slicing
technique for herbs and greens — "or
that they hate to cook but they've start-
ed to try at home and they are trying
new things on menus."
"That's why I'm doing all of this in the
first place — to spread the gospel." LI
Devra Ferst is editor of the Jew and the
Carrot food blog (http://blogs.forward.com/
the-jew-and-the-carrotA a new Forward and
Hazon partnership.
Episodes of Top Chef-Just Desserts premiere 10 p.m. Wednesdays on Bravo.
Check listings for rebroadcasts.