One thing you may have picked up on during his dominant run on Top Chef this season is that season 22 winner Tristen Epps-Long is a homework-doer. He might not have been quite as obvious about all his research as, say, season 19 and 20 winner Buddha Lo (who I nicknamed “Moneyball” early on), but Tristen’s preparation was plain to see if you were paying attention. Take the finale episode for instance, during which Epps-Long prepared two versions of one of his courses with two different fish (one with monkfish, another with cod), just to see which one would work better.
That’s one of those moves that your average restaurant chef probably couldn’t get away with, but it feels like clever gamesmanship on a TV cooking competition show. Incidentally, Top Chef wasn’t Epps-Long’s first one of those. Back in 2014, he appeared on ABC’s The Taste, placing third and going on to work under his TV mentor, Marcus Samuelsson, with two separate stints in Harlem and Miami. He also won on Chopped, lost on Beat Bobby Flay, and appeared on Guy’s Grocery Games, in an episode I didn’t bother watching (did he win? sound off in the comments!).
Point is, Epps-Long had been doing this television chef thing probably longer than you even realized, along with being a James Beard semi-finalist (in 2024) and receiving a boatload of other accolades along the way. Epps-Long (who added the “Long” to his last name to honor his stepfather, who he calls his father) sort of typifies the latter-seasons Top Chef contestant, in that he showed up already pretty well-established and isn’t a stranger to television lights.
Even so, Top Chef is still a big deal in the food world. And even among a group of contestants mostly just as acclaimed as he was, Epps-Long still dominated. Pack Your Knives has him tied for fifth on the all-time earnings list, and our Twitter stats nerd Naomi Stephens has him ranked as the third or fourth most-dominant Top Chef champion of all time — alongside Paul Qui, Richard Blais, and Stephanie Izard. You get it; he kicked ass.
And while all the dramatic moments (like losing his stepfather midway through an episode) and beautiful dishes made it to screen, Epps-Long’s level of preparation was arguably underplayed. He called himself “a dweeb” more than once on the show, but never quite revealed the extent of it.
I spoke to Tristen this past week (yes, it was supposed to happen earlier, but we both went on trips right after the Top Chef finale aired). In conversation he comes off polished but not in a phony way, intentional about what he wants to get across but still candid (Kristen Kish was like that too). It was probably the prepration that most stood out. Among other things, he talked about how, during culinary school, he’d often attend different sections of the same class.
I loved culinary school. I was out of the house, I was by myself, I got to go to school to do something I really liked — it was great. I'm not going to say I didn't party or do any of that, but I also got to every single class. I went to every extracurricular event, and even if I didn't learn something in one class in the beginning of the day, I went to the next class and the next part of the day because I'm still paying the same tuition.
You could go to the same class, a different meeting, and it was okay?
You could if you asked. No one was really going to stop me, but I don't know how many people actually asked that question. If I was tasked to just do carrots and I see someone over there doing lobsters and sweetbreads and butchering meat, then I'm going to say, well, I'm paying the same tuition, can I come to the later class if I have time, and then work with that group and learn this thing? No one ever said no.
Incidentally, I tried that same “I’m paying the same tuition argument” when I’d get shut out of a section with a writer I wanted to learn from in my non-fiction MFA program and it never worked for me, but that’s another story.
Besides the accolades and on-camera experience, another thing that distinguishes Top Chef competitors these days from ones from the first ten seasons or so is the possibility of being “students of the game.” Epps-Long was certainly that, even much more so than he revealed on the show.
“I've seen every episode of every season and I have looked up every notable person's menus and what their journey was. There's not a lot that I don't remember or haven’t looked up about Top Chef. And when I found out we were going to Canada, please believe, I went to the second page of every Google search instead of just hitting the first.”
Naturally, I asked him the classic Marc Maron question, modified for Top Chef purposes, “Who are your guys?”
If not my obsession, but my let-me-look-up-everything started with Voltaggio season, season six. It's funny, we call it “the Voltaggio season,” as if they encompassed the entire season, but that season, Michael Voltaggio was kind of like my hero.
He's the one who influenced me to go to the Greenbriar and go live in West Virginia for three years. I was a really big fan of Tiffany Derry during her season [7]. She was just this big, bold personality and stayed really true to southern roots — but every once in a while you'd see Southeast Asian come out of her and just some really amazing things. Who else did I really like? Nyesha Arrington [season 9]. She was amazing. I had followed her career a little bit, so seeing her on Top Chef was really cool. And then in the later seasons, Eric Adjepong [season 15]. He was kind of on my hall of fame. And then Buddha, obviously, the most dominant, only two-season winner.
I’ve often made the point over the years that Top Chef tends to come down to who made the least mistakes, and whose dish had the least to criticize, and it sounds like Epps-Long’s research steered him in a similar direction.
“I'm a student of mistakes. I never looked at who was doing great, I always looked at who tanked it or who was doing really well and then tanked it, and then how they recovered. Richard Blais had one of the coolest seasons ever, and then lost in the last second and then came back and won. That's the things that I learned from — did he learn from his mistake, and how can I learn from that?”
All of which brings us to the subject of this sorta-listicle (you can listen to the whole conversation above), Tristen Epps-Long’s four things you should absolutely not do on Top Chef.
