Wildcard Kitchen Season 2 Episode 3 Recap

“James Beard awards are the Oscars of the food world - it’s very exclusive.”

This was the perfect week to have three James Beard Award winners cook in Wildcard Kitchen - this year’s semi-finalists were just released! (I’ll be doing a deep dive into James Beard Awards and Top Chef contestants in the next couple of months.) Congrats to these Top Chef James Beard Award semi-finalists!

• Best Emerging Chef - Danny Garcia

• Best chef CA - Laura Ozyilmaz

• Best Chef Great Lakes - Avishar Barua

• Best Chef Midwest - Dan Jacobs

• Best Chef Mountain - Hosea Rosenberg

• Best Chef NY - Kwame Onwuachi

• Best Chef NE - Valentine Howell

• Best Chef NW & Pacific - Sheldon Simeon

• Best Chef SE - Sara Bradley and Ashleigh Shanti

• Best Chef Texas - Evelyn Garcia

This week’s Wildcard Kitchen episode pits Stephanie Izard (Top Chef Season 4 winner), Jonathon Sawyer, and Karen Akunowicz (Top Chef Seasons 13 and 17) against each other. Fun fact (yes, I’m a nerd): all three of them were on Seasons 4 and 5 of Tournament of Champions (TOC), though they never battled each other.

I’m writing this part before I’ve seen the episode because I want to guess which of these three chefs will win this episode. They haven’t all been on WCK before (only Stephanie), so I needed something else to compare them. Tournament of Champions has the famous “randomizer,” which adds elements similar to the wildcards in this show. So, I’ll be using data from their appearances on TOC to inform my bet here. (Check out a more detailed analysis on Instagram here.)

It was actually PYK’s own Eric Adjepong who beat Stephanie in Season 5! Based on the data (and the assumption that skills on TOC would apply here on WCK), I’d bet on Karen to win the most money on this week’s episode of WCK.