Before she became winner and host of Top Chef and the executive chef and owner of her own restaurant, Kristen Kish was making cheap dorm meals like the rest of us. Her vice? Mac and cheese. “Make it [according] to the package, and then what you do is you add ketchup over the top, a can of canned corn, and tabasco,” Kish tells Her Campus in an exclusive interview. “That was my go-to in college.”
Kish’s palate has since elevated, but she stays open-minded with her recipes. “I never look at [food] as being weird,” Kish says. “For me, it’s always someone else’s normal, wherever you go in the world.” Some may say her curiosity in the kitchen is what led her to all her accomplishments — Kish won Season 10 of Top Chef in 2013; returned to the show as a guest judge in seasons 12, 18, and 19; and she officially took over as the show’s host in 2024 for Season 21. Now, she has her own restaurant, Arlo Grey, in Austin, Texas.
Top Chef isn’t the only show Kish has been featured on, though — she was also a part of The Traitors Season 4, and while she loved being on the reality series (which filmed in the Scottish Highlands), she didn’t necessarily love the food. “I particularly did not enjoy the food that we were provided in Scotland — I did have McDonald’s from Scotland, though, which I thought was yummy,” Kish says. “On Top Chef, obviously, the food is wildly creative and fabulous most of the time. So very, very wildly different experiences.”
For Kish, though, coffee may be more important than food. “It’s a necessity,” she says. “I mean, I can probably count on one hand how many days I forgot or couldn’t have coffee. It is the fuel to my car in the morning.” And Kish has gotten her at-home coffee recipe down to a science. “It depends on my job for the day. My jobs range drastically. When I am home, I will start with two black coffees, hot with a straw out of a mug. It is my downtime, my meditation time, my therapy, self therapy time,” she says.
The afternoon is where Kish experiments — especially with the help of Starbucks’s Sweet Cream Enhancers. “If I’m in the mood and I want to experiment, that’s when I’m adding other things to [my coffee], when I want something with a different flavor profile,” Kish says. “When I want a little extra something, [I add] just a splash of [Sweet Cream], not to make it overly sweet, but just to add a little body and richness to it. You need different energies for those two things.”
Because of her daily need and deep love for coffee, Kish allows herself to indulge. “If [coffee] is the thing where I spend a little bit of extra money on, I will make up for it somewhere else,” she says. “I won’t go out to dinner. I won’t get five desserts at dinner or whatever. Sometimes, the thing that brings you the most joy in life, I just kind of do it, you know?”
Kish imparts some advice onto college students who are looking to save money but love their caffeine fix, too: “I’m not gonna tell you how to make it cheaper for yourself. I’m gonna say enjoy it, and then find out where to save the money in other places.” One way to save that money is through meal prepping. Instead of going out to eat, Kish suggests preparing a week’s worth of food in advance to avoid finding reasons to order in. “If you prepare and plan just like studying and being in college, I feel like you’re a little bit more capable at managing all the stuff that comes after,” she says.
Sometimes, though, Kish loves an unhinged late-night takeout order. “I could put pizza rolls in the oven while I’m ordering, and I stacked my order with chicken tenders,” she says. “And it all just comes at once, and it becomes this international buffet. I love options.”
As for what’s next for Kish, just like her takeout orders, Kish doesn’t limit herself. “More Top Chef, more television, maybe more books, expanding all of my current businesses,” she says, and “maybe, maybe we’re going to enter the beauty world.”