Yahoo News 'Next Level Chef' Crowns a New Winner: 'My Journey Can Be an Inspiration' (Exclusive)
The winner of Next Level Chef talks to PEOPLE about competing on the Gordon Ramsay cooking competition
Warning: This article contains spoilers for season 2 of Next Level Chef.
And the winner is ...
In the season finale of Gordon Ramsay's Next Level Chef on Thursday, Tucker Ricchio rose to the top, winning the $250,000 grand prize along with a one-year mentorship under Ramsay and the show's other judges, Nyesha Arrington and Richard Blais. PEOPLE sat down with the San Francisco native to talk about competing on the show, winning and what comes next.
"I am so blessed and thankful to have had this opportunity," Ricchio tells PEOPLE. "It was truly amazing to work with all these badass chefs from all across the country."
For the finale, Ricchio and her fellow finalists, Pilar Omega and Christopher Spinosa, were challenged with cooking an appetizer, a fish course and a meat course across all three kitchen levels in just 90-minutes.
Ricchio's original plan was to dedicate 20 minutes to the appetizer, 30 minutes to fish and 40 minutes to meat. However, she ran slightly over her hoped for time in the appetizer course and was minutes behind the other chefs in the fish course leaving her a time crunch at the end. While she said it was "not a spot I wanted to be in," she is glad she took "a few extra seconds here to make this dish perfect" for the fight in the finale.
"I didn't cook fish a lot and I did some Asian flavors in that dish. I really wanted to show that I wasn't just French and Italian food," says Ricchio. "I wanted to show the judges that I have a very wide variety of things that I'm capable of."
Ricchio was hand selected by Ramsay to compete on his team during the competition. "It was so amazing to just show up and be like, oh yeah, he picked you," she says. "He's looked at who you are as a chef and he thinks he wants you on his team. You could be a winner because he's not playing to lose here."
The Next Level Chef winner said she "watched season one like five different times" before arriving at the set to help prepare for the show. In spite of a few bungled platform grabs (her very first and the episode when a fellow competitor took 10 seconds off her time), Ricchio was seemingly able to master the show's unique format where competitors scramble to select ingredients off of a moving platform.
Though she still considers the moments of choosing ingredients the "most challenging" part of the competition, the chef shared her secrets to success. "I just gave myself a five word mantra: protein, starch, veg, sauce, garnish. Because, in my opinion, if you run to the platform with a plan, what if the stuff that you need isn't there," she says. "So, I was like, if I just run up there with no plan and just remember to grab five things that will make this dish come together, maybe that will be the winning combination of things."
Ricchio adds that her experience in Michelin starred kitchens, like San Francisco's Acquerello, a holder of two stars, also helped prepare her for the intense competition.
"You really learn not only a lot of techniques and different flavor profiles, but you learn time management, you learn how to handle intense pressure and all those things came in really clutch for me in the show," she says.
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As a winner, Ricchio, who is gay, hopes to continue to set an example for other women, especially young queer women, in the industry. "I hope that my story, my journey can be an inspiration to somebody else. You never know until you see somebody like yourself doing it," she says.
After all, Ricchio was inspired by seeing another woman in professional kitchens on her own TV. While watching an episode of Netflix's Chef's Table that featured Dominique Crenn, a French chef who was the first woman to receive three Michelin stars in the United States with her San Francisco restaurant Atelier Crenn, Ricchio was galvanized seeing "her shining in a field where women don't typically shine or even get a seat at the table."
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"That's kind of what started it all," she recalls. "I was literally studying for nursing school on my couch watching this episode and I was like, oh, complete 180, we're going to culinary school instead actually."
Looking towards the future, Ricchio is "excited to work with each one of the mentors because they all bring something very different to the table," she says of Ramsay, Arrington and Blais.
She has her sights set on having her own cooking show one day, or hosting one.
"I don't want to put too many constraints on myself and just be very open-minded, running into this with open arms," says Ricchio. "I'm really excited about this opportunity and to learn from these people because I've already learned so much in the past 15 weeks."
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