by Kristen Wile

Top Chef lead judge Tom Colicchio is no stranger to the Carolinas, having spent nearly 15 years doing consulting work in South Carolina. He hadn’t spent much time in Charlotte, however, ahead of filming the upcoming season of Top Chef here with his fellow Bravo talents, host Kristen Kish and judge Gail Simmons. We sat down with Colicchio to hear his take on the food scenes in cities like Charlotte, and why they might hold the future to good eats. 

Unpretentious Palate: Charlotte has no James Beard winners. Michelin is coming here, and it’s unclear whether we’ll get a star. How much do national awards define a food city? What does it take to get to that level? 
Tom Colicchio: I don’t know why, for the longest time, Charlotte, even though it’s a good-sized city, it just was never known as a food town. I don’t know how much that is food writers here not being connected enough, because I know that the Beard awards, writers and the panel, whatever town they’re from, whatever city they’re from, they fight fiercely for those people. If you were frustrated with the food writing here, maybe the food writing here wasn’t such that it was getting recognized, the restaurants weren’t getting recognized. I just don’t know the food scene here enough to know why that’s the case. Hopefully it’ll change. 

UP: What’s your first impression of the food scene here? 
TC: It’s good. Over the last 20 years or so, you’ve got a lot of young chefs who, they went to the big cities to learn, maybe spent some time in France or Europe somewhere, and they don’t want to live in cities. Cities are really expensive. They want to get a home. They want to raise a family. They want to stay close to home. And so you find really good restaurants opening up everywhere.

There’s good food everywhere in America now. Some places take a little longer for it to catch up. There seems to be a food culture here and plenty of young chefs doing interesting things. I just think for the longest time it was known as a steakhouse town and that was it.

The national players that were here, that’s where you went. That seems like it’s definitely changing. From what we’ve seen, the places I’ve eaten, there’s definitely good stuff happening. 

UP: Do you think the quality of life shift that chefs are seeking overall is leading more people to come to smaller cities like Charlotte? 
TC: Well, a couple of things: you can afford to open a restaurant. You can’t afford to open a restaurant in New York. Even Brooklyn’s gotten crazy. It’s impossible to find a place, a decent-sized place, that you’re going to spend less than $750,000 a year on rent. It’s saturated, and you can’t get staff because young cooks can’t afford to live there, and so it’s just becoming more and more difficult in large cities. So yeah, I think secondary cities, tertiary cities are where you’re going to see good restaurants opening. 

UP: You mentioned that there’s great food across America now, is that something that you would say you’ve seen here?
TC: Here there’s probably a good 15 places you can get a really good meal and then there’s places that have been around a long time, tried-and-true, that you can get a good meal as well, but I just I can’t be an expert. I’ve been here a couple weeks and I’ve only been out three times. I go home a lot; it’s a short flight.

Every city we go to, no matter where we are, every season, writers come and ask, ‘What’s your favorite place here?’ and I wouldn’t tell you. You didn’t say what’s your favorite place, but I wouldn’t tell you if I had one. It’s not fair.

For me, when you see farms close to a large city, there’s food culture, and often the food culture isn’t necessarily a restaurant culture, but I think things are changing. Here’s a big banking center, so people are entertaining. They are going out. But I think for too long they went to steakhouses; now they need to come to the smaller restaurants and find some interesting food. 

UP: It’s interesting you mention farms because to me, people ask me often like what Charlotte’s signature dish is, and to me, it’s just the farm to table. 
TC: It’s a silly question, what’s your signature dish? When I get asked that question, it is ‘I don’t have one,’ because I cook seasonally, so how can I have a signature dish?