Herbivore's Delight
Inked|May 2017

Top Chef contestant Jennifer “Fear” Zavala enjoys cooking “in the weeds.”

George Polgar
Herbivore's Delight

Anyone who has ever toiled amid the flames, flaring tempers, and pots-and-pans-clanging cacophony of a restaurant kitchen for more than a few months, knows that the Food Network-hyped glamour of the chef life is mostly bullshit. And the only way to survive and thrive in that scalding, sizzling, aromatic world is to flash killer culinary chops and a bullet proof attitude.

So when Jennifer “Fear” Zavala joined the Sixth Season of Top Chef (Las Vegas), you might say she was just a little better seasoned than the competition. “In the restaurant business chefs peak at 25 years old because of the perception of restaurant owners that chefs beyond that age are too set in their ways, just too hard to re-train,” Zavala says as she putters around the kitchen of a secret location that was only disclosed a few hours before her latest Cannabis Cuisine Dinner.

Without putting a number on it, the mother of two boys —10 months and 10 years old—says she’s way past the age of taking too much direction in her cooking, though she has a rep as a team player. That should have raised red flags for her as she embarked on her month-long sequestration on the set of Top Chef.

Though the TV-viewing foodies who lap up the redolent mix of recipes, drama and competition down to the last sinfully delicious slurp probably don’t recognize it as such, Top Chef is a show about bosses taming talented but undisciplined chefs and squeezing them creatively, emotionally and to the limits of physical endurance.

“I think they thought I was coming from thug street because of the ‘Face Tat Leader’ thing,” says the diminutive Latina, referring to the star tattoos on her face that trail down and wrap around her neck into an elaborate piece artwork beneath her apron and clothes. “But what the hell… I’m from Connecticut.”

This story is from the May 2017 edition of Inked.

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This story is from the May 2017 edition of Inked.

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