This Charlotte chef competed on Food Network’s ‘Chopped.’ Here’s what happened.
Viewers across the country tuned in to see chef Anthony Denning of Another?! Food Truck as he appeared on Food Network’s “Chopped” competition show and brought home the win for Charlotte.
The show — which has showcased the talent of a few of Charlotte’s top chefs — pits contestants against each other in a race to make an appetizer, entree and dessert with a basket of secret ingredients that often don’t seem to go together. One chef leaves the competition in each round.
He competed against chefs Jess Ngo of SRV in Boston, Patrick Costa of De La Nonna in Los Angeles and Jasmine Norton of The Urban Oyster (now The Urban Burger Bar) in Baltimore. The judges were chefs Geoffrey Zakarian, Amanda Freitag and Millie Peartree.
How to watch: Denning appeared on Season 53, Episode 2 in a battle where cheese takes center stage. The show aired at 8 p.m., Tuesday, Nov. 8 on Food Network. You can also catch it on reruns Wednesday, Nov. 9 at 3 a.m. or Tuesday, Nov. 15 at 1 p.m.
Check it out on Insta: You can get a peak of Denning on the show on Food Network’s Instagram, with a clip showing him in the appetizer round, using cheese sushi, king crab legs, spinach and Asiago cheese, plus some Fontina, to make a cheesy Southern-style potato soup, featuring pancetta and crab. Meanwhile, the judges were going wild about his idea.
“I kinda look at Food Network as the NFL for us younger chefs,“ said Denning, who noted on the show that his fusion style of cooking is heavily tied to his North Carolina roots.
The competition: In the entree round, Denning and the other competitors faced a challenge to create a dish out of a pizza burrito, beech mushrooms, rose veal chops and taleggio cheese. He made a veal schnitzel with mac and cheese and a beech mushroom succotash, adding havarti, fontina and smoked gouda, along with asparagus, to the dish.
The dessert round pitted Denning and Costa against each other to combine a cheese cracker crunch cake, grapes, sour cherry spread and honey goat gouda into the last course. Denning made honey gouda corn cakes with a cheese cracker marscapone whip and golden raisin and grape chutney, saying, “Cornbread is a big part of cooking in the South.”
While they worked, Freitag said, “Everything Anthony has made today is full of flavor.”
What it was like: “It was everything it was advertised to me,” he said. The baskets included ingredients he hadn’t worked with before. “Some of it, I hadn’t even heard of,” he added.
‘It was real’: Although he isn’t sure how he got selected for the show, he had been contacted by Food Network before and just hadn’t believed it was a valid offer. “I got an email and I kinda thought it was fake — but i found out it was real.”
He enjoyed his time on the show, despite the fast pace and a long day of taping that stretched past 12 hours. “For me, I think the only surprise was that it is exactly what it looks like — it was pretty much exactly what it looks like on TV.”
Several chefs from Charlotte have made appearances on Food Network in the past few years. Among them are:
- Chef Lisa Brooks of Heart & Soul Personal Chef Service was on “Chopped’s” first all-Black cast and judging panel.
- Chris Coleman of the Goodyear House and Old Town Kitchen and Cocktails was crowned ”Chopped” champion, as was Luca Annunziata of Forchetta.
- Coleman, Sam Diminich of Your Farms, Your Table and Alyssa Wilen of Chef Alyssa’s Kitchen have appeared on “Beat Bobby Flay.”
- Frankie White of B.W. Sweets was featured on ”Girl Scout Cookie Challenge.”
- Optometrist and baker Sherelle Morrison was a contestant on the “Halloween Baking Championship.”
This story was originally published November 7, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
