'Next Level Chef' winner Gabi Chappel opens up about working in 'toxic' kitchens: We need to 'shift in another direction'
“Next Level Chef” Season 3 winner Gabi Chappel is ready for a “shift” in the culinary industry.
The cooking competition champion says she thinks highly of her two fellow finalists, Christina Miros and Zach Laidlaw, because they are the type of people who will enact change in a famously “toxic” environment.
“All I want is for us to succeed. At the end of the day, you’re rooting for people who you know are good people,” Chappel, 30, tells Page Six exclusively. “Because you know they’re going to be the people who make a difference in the industry, you know they’re going to be the ones who aren’t tolerating some of the more … hierarchical mayhem.”
While the plant-based chef acknowledges that there is “a time and a place” for organizational “standards,” she says her competitors would never bestow the “toxic environment that is rampant throughout the industry.”
Chappel also admits that she has heard from numerous chefs-in-training that their bosses have acted abusively in response to their own treatment working up the ranks.
“Why would you not want to be the person that breaks that cycle? It’s human conditioning in a way,” she explains. “You feel a little bit vilified because you’re like, ‘I’m starving for this sense of affirmation,’ and the only way that maybe we we can feel like we can do it is by going in that direction.
“It’s tough, but I feel like that’s where we have to kind of add empathy.”
Chappel even claims Jeremy Allen White’s hit show “The Bear,” which documents the chaotic interior of restaurant kitchens, is “incredibly valid and accurate.”
“It’s a tough place to be, and I’m really hopeful that we can at least start to shift that in another direction,” she says.
Since Chappel won the Fox series, she has been working with her mentor, Gordon Ramsay, to host “Gabi’s Next Course” on the digital platform Bite and will move on with celebrity chefs Richard Blais and Nyesha Arrington, both of whom co-host with the “MasterChef” judge.
