New York’s pretty much the center of the culinary universe. So it’s no surprise that Netflix’s new globally focused cooking competition, “The Final Table,” stars a few local faces.
“Stress is what drives us,” competitor Aaron Bludorn, the executive chef at Upper East Side French eatery Café Boulud, tells The Post. “The adrenaline keeps us coming back for more.”
The 10-episode cook-off, which is now streaming, features 24 professional chefs from around the world who are paired into two-person teams.
Every episode, the 12 pairs are given one hour to cook their own riffs on a single country’s signature dish — for one episode, it’s Mexican tacos; for another, it’s a traditional English breakfast. They then present those meals to a panel of three celebrity judges from that country. Any chefs whose dishes are deemed unworthy are forced to cook a second dish in an elimination round. Ultimately, one team gets chopped per episode.
Along with Bludorn, the show stars another chef with New York roots: Jessica Lorigo, who was born in Buffalo.
“Working at a pop-up restaurant in New York City,” Lorigo says, she met her “Final Table” teammate, Johnny Spero. Lorigo, 26, is currently head chef at Topa Sukaldería, a Basque-Latin restaurant in San Sebastián, Spain, while Spero now owns a restaurant in Washington, DC. But her and Spero’s New York moment made an impression on him. “The show contacted Johnny . . . and asked him who would be his ideal partner,” Lorigo says, “and he mentioned me.”
‘Cooking for Daniel Boulud prepared me for this. He will change things on the drop of a dime.’
Unlike Lorigo, Bludorn had never even met his teammate, Graham Campbell, a chef in Scotland. But he says he was ready anyway.
“Cooking for Daniel Boulud prepared me for this,” says Bludorn, 34. “He will change things on the drop of a dime, and you’d better be ready for it. In these high-pressure situations, when you have to change something in the middle of your stride because something isn’t working, that kind of training is invaluable.”
Still, Lorigo says, even the craziest fine-dining kitchens can’t ready you for everything. In the show’s Brazil episode, Lorigo and her cooking partner had one hour to plan and make a dish with only one instruction: cassava, a starchy vegetable also known as yuca, had to be its centerpiece.
“It wasn’t like going onto ‘Top Chef,’ where you know what ‘Top Chef’ was about,” she says. “There’s no basic prior knowledge of the show to study up on . . . It’s definitely quite hard to prepare yourself.”
And while Bludorn is used to meeting high standards, he struggled to figure out what the various country representatives were looking for.
“It was a learning curve,” he says. “Sometimes they wanted traditional dishes, and they didn’t want us to play around with their country’s cuisine, because it was something they hold a lot of pride for.” For their Mexican dish, Bludorn and his partner made hamachi tacos with a pumpkin-seed wafer and pickled vegetables. It wasn’t spicy or traditional enough for the judges, so Bludorn and Campbell were forced into the elimination round.
So what’s the big prize these New Yorkers are after? Status and glory.
Rather than a cash prize or their own restaurant, the winning team gets to sit at what the show’s executive producer Robin Ashbrook calls “a literal table,” where they and nine international culinary legends can hobnob over their mutual greatness. Some of the famous faces include Grant Achatz, who opened Alinea in Chicago; Andoni Luis Aduriz, who owns Mugaritz, a fine-dining Basque restaurant in Spain; and Carlo Cracco, who hosted the Italian version of “Hell’s Kitchen” and “MasterChef Italia.”
“We’ve got Michelin-starred chefs [competing on the show]. A cash prize didn’t feel like it matched the stature and grandeur,” says Ashbrook.
“You win the right to sit at the top table among the culinary legends. What you do with it is really up to you.”