AUGUST 2020 27Her Own Lane How Melissa King’sexperience on season 12 of Top Chef helpedforge a path less traveled to a successfulcareer—and a season 17 winBy Hunter LewisTHE TASTEMAKERHOW DO YOU MAKE AN ITALIAN BUTCHER who is proudly and
loudly dressed in the colors of his country’s flag weep tears of
joy? If you’re chef Melissa King, you make tiramisu—but you
make it personal, replacing the bitter espresso with the Hong
Kong milk tea memories of your childhood.
To be fair to Dario Cecchini, there were few dry eyes among
the Top Chef guest judges by the time we finished King’s final
course during the taping of the season 17 finale at a hotel in
the foggy mountains above the Tuscan town of Barga. (I’m not
crying; you’re crying!) When the TV lights shone brightest, King
defeated her two competitors by weaving together the story and
flavors of her upbringing, using Italian ingredients and precise
techniques, to create a four-course menu that built momentum
with each dish and clearly set her apart from the other finalists.
“I’m getting goosebumps right now thinking about it,” King
told me recently. “I channeled the energy of my food and pre-
sented my true, authentic self to you all. For Dario to eat it,
and for it to trigger that emotion, and for him to understand
where I was coming from was so beautiful. It brought every-
thing together.”
Born in Los Angeles to a Cantonese mother and a Shanghainese
father, King was raised in the San Gabriel Valley and came up
through the Bay Area ranks in kitchens like Campton Place, Luce,
and the Dining Room at the Ritz-Carlton with Ron Siegel, whom
she credits as the biggest influence on her cooking philosophy
and career. After stints as a butcher and private chef, King got
a call from Bravo producers and joined the Top Chef season 12
cast in Boston, where she cooked her way to the finals. In spite
of being someone who’d led Michelin-starred kitchens and was
at top of her class, including at the Culinary Institute of America,
she found cooking on camera a big challenge.
“I was painfully shy most of my life,” she said. “I couldn’t give
a speech at my sister’s wedding. You see a different side of me
[in Top Chef season 17]—someone who has grown up more. I
was trying to prove something last time to my parents. This
time, I was trying to do it for me.”
I tasted King’s confidence during the filming of episode 11
at the iconic California restaurant Michael’s, where she glazedsimply grilled quail with a hot-and-sour sauce cooked down
with plums. She’d picked out the fruit from the nearby Santa
Monica Farmers Market, and the inspiration for the dish came
from lacquered char siu.
“That dish was the most perfect display of where her strengths
shine,” said Brooke Williamson, the winner of Top Chef season
14, who sat at the judges’ table at Michael’s. “Her biggest strength
is her ability to focus in on specific ingredients or flavors or
concepts and have the confidence to follow through without
overcomplicating it.”
As fellow California chefs and Top Chef contestants,
Williamson and King have formed a friendship that occasion-
ally turns into collaborations at events like Clusterfest, a comedy
festival in San Francisco, where the duo got on stage to share
how to break down a whole pig.
While Williamson continues to operate brick-and-mortar
restaurants around Los Angeles, King has managed to rede-
fine what it means to be a chef right now in one of the most
expensive cities in the country, and she’s doing it without the
constraints of four walls or a large staff. Her projects include
pop-up dinners; brand partnerships like the one she has with
San Francisco ice cream maker Humphry Slocombe (newest
flavor: Hong Kong milk tea ice cream); a line of handcrafted
signature sauces; and—in a proud nod to her role as a trailblazer
for LGBTQ chefs —a collection of Pride-themed hats, sales of
which benefit The Trevor Project, a national organization that
provides crisis intervention services to LGBTQ youth. (Both of
the latter are available on her personal website, chefmelissa
king.com, where you can also sign up for her cooking classes.)
It shows that the new economy of events, product lines, and
partnerships means chefs no longer have to follow one career
track. “My entire life I grew up thinking I wanted to own a
restaurant and be a chef and get a Michelin star. It wasn’t until
my experience with Top Chef that the world became so much
more vast and open. I can do anything I want.” And just like
she did in Tuscany during the show’s finale, King is writing
her story her way. “I can create my own version of what it is toPHOTOGRAPHY: SUSAN YEE be a successful chef.”