All is relatively calm when we arrive at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre for the Chef’s Challenge Saturday. Call it the lull after the crazy that comes before the next crazy.
If you haven’t heard, the Chef’s Challenge is a slightly wild fundraising adventure where top campaigners get a chance to participate in an amateur, Iron Chef-inspired competition. All money raised goes to breast and ovarian cancer research at Mount Sinai Hospital.
This year, celeb chef Bobby Flay hosted, with Nadia G, Massimo Capra, David Rocco, Lynn Crawford, Mark McEwan and Chuck Hughes leading eager beaver teams of amateur chefs.
The morning challenges — of how well those top-notch foodies can ice a cake under the clock and how fast they can debone a chicken — are done, as is the lunchtime strategizing session for how to prepare and present the secret evening meal.
And so we found contestant Amanda Gibbs, a culinary arts student, hanging out, waiting to get autographs on her school’s chef jackets from all the celebrity chefs in attendance.
“My class is like my family and I’d do anything for them,” Gibbs says. She got to the Convention Centre at 8 a.m. that morning and wandered the halls. The event didn’t start until 10 a.m., but she was too excited to stay home.
Gibbs freaked out, she said, when she got the call from one of her instructors, who told her she was going to attend the event. Turns out, she had raised the most of all the students at her school, even though she had no idea there was a possibility to actually attend the event.
“To meet some of my mentors who inspired me to be a cook,” Gibbs says, “I couldn’t even talk.”
She’s there with Ray Park, a caterer, who was on last year’s Chef’s Challenge winning team. He raised a whopping $30,000 this time around (with his mom), and also happens to be all of 13 years old.
“I’ve known Massimo for three years. We’re buds,” Park says. “I love saying that.”
Both Park and Gibbs are on Capra’s team. After Gibbs came back down to earth, she says the strategizing session was a bit of a let down.
“It felt so disorganized to me, and I’m a very organized person … I’m [used to working] in restaurant settings,” she says.
Gibbs is still waiting for more autographs, but it turns out that Hughes’ autograph is a pretty styling lobster cartoon, as charming the man himself.
Getting Chuck Hughs' autograph
And while almost all of the other contestants slowly head out for a break before the big night, Gibbs stays put. She still has to get Crawford’s signature, and she’s not leaving until she has it.
The Chef’s Challenge raised a total of $1.2 million this year, and team Mark McEwan won.
