Is Ted Allen a Chef? Info on the Chopped Hosts Career

Ted Allen Isn’t a Chef, but the ‘Chopped’ Host Still Has Major Foodie Chops

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Dec. 8 2020, Published 12:34 p.m. ET

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Considering all his appearances on culinary TV shows, you might be shocked to know that Ted Allen isn’t actually a chef. But don’t be mistaken: The Chopped host nonetheless is aware of a helluva lot about food.

For starters, Ted was a eating place critic at Chicago magazine prior to becoming a member of Esquire mag in 1997 and writing about food and eating for the mag for the next 20 years. And then got here one in all his greatest claims to popularity….

Ted was once the O.G. foodie on ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy.’

Ted become a family identify in 2003 when he joined the “Fab Five” of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, Bravo’s precursor to the Netflix truth collection Queer Eye.

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Antoni Porowski and Ted Allen in 2019

In fact, the James Beard Foundation Award winner is the one that got Queer Eye foodie Antoni Porowski a activity on the Netflix reboot. They met at a cookbook signing in 2012, and Antoni worked as Ted’s private assistant for three years. As of 2018, they lived around the side road from one every other in Brooklyn, Ted told Vanity Fair.

“He’s a very good prepare dinner and taught me a lot,” Ted stated of Antoni. “Food is his interest. … A large number of the stuff he does is what I name comfort-food bliss. … He’s a cook dinner with a perspective, and I recognize that.”

You won’t catch Ted competing on ‘Chopped.’

Ted spread out about his cooking chops in a 2016 Eater interview in which he mulled over the prospect of being a contestant on a meals pageant show.

“The thing is, I’m now not a skilled chef, so I’d be at liberty to compete in opposition to people who are kind of at my level, however it might have to be like, you already know, home chefs,” he stated. “The house cook version of no matter.”

Ted also revealed that he doesn’t watch any of the opposite food festival presentations — but only as a result of he’s so “steeped in that lifestyles always” in his paintings. “People have requested all the time when I’m going to cook dinner, when I am ever going to cook dinner on Chopped,” he stated. “I’m now not going to.”

He doesn’t feel guilty about meals.

In a 2016 Q&A with Food Network’s FN Dish, Ted stated that he’s now not a food snob however that he would possibly not devour much of the rest that’s now not quality meals. “The more time that goes by means of, if something isn’t excellent, if the cooking isn’t good, then I just take a few bites and I stop,” he said. “And if one thing is excellent, I’ll stuff my face. I don’t in reality eat a large volume of meals except one thing’s truly good.”

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And guilty pleasures? This former Top Chef pass judgement on has none. “This is also one in every of my moral failings, but I don’t really feel accountable about a lot,” he told the web page. “I don’t have much time to fret about feeling guilty. 

"I’m not a giant overeater. … I had a birthday recently that produced an enormous amount of cheese in my house, and for two days … I had nothing but cheese and crackers for lunch. So good. I don’t feel guilty about food. I don’t need to."

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