Spoiler Alert: This will talk about the Bravo series Top Chef Masters. If you are not caught up with the most recent episodes, please skip this post.
Bravo TV’s Top Chef Masters is a cooking competition show where top U.S. chefs battle it out with the winning monies going to their favorite charities. This season, Tony Mantuano of Spiaggia restaurant in Chicago chose Feeding America.
On May 12, I was fortunate enough to attend his viewing party at the upper rooms of his restaurant. It was great to meet this very easy-going, unassuming man who is a legend throughout the culinary world. Not everyone can boast that a newly-elected U.S. president chose their restaurant to have a private celebratory dinner with his wife (as President Obama did when elected in November 2008).
The viewing party carried The Simpsons theme throughout the party — including a Chief Wiggum cake and a recreation of Chef Mantuano’s Quickfire Contest dessert, bacon doughnut puffs. There were about 100 people in attendance and the viewing party was also a fundraiser for our local food bank, the Greater Chicago Food Depository.
Thank you Chef Mantuano for choosing Feeding America and for raising $15,000 throughout the series for us.
Another note, Chef Rick Moonen of Rick Moonen’s RM Seafood at Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas chose our Las Vegas food bank, Three Square Food Bank as his charity. As of this blog post, he was still in the competition.