This past April, two lucky culinary students from Le Cordon Bleu were given the opportunity of a lifetime: to team up with world-famous chefs and compete in the third annual Chase Sapphire Preferred® Grill Challenge at Bon Appétit’s four-day food extravaganza, Vegas Uncork’d. Held at the highly popular MGM Grand Pools, this third annual grilling showdown paired the aspiring chefs with the one-and-only Emeril Lagasse and Michelin-starred chef and restaurateur Michael Mina, as both teams battled it out to win $20,000 to put towards tuition—and bragging rights to last a lifetime.
This exciting event made its mark on the long history of kitchen throw-downs and ambitious chefs who have competed to achieve culinary greatness. But how far back does that line go? We decided to investigate, and find out how cooking became the popular spectator sport it is today.
Faster, Higher, More Delicious
Competitive cooking didn’t really get its start until the late 19th century. Back in the 1890s, inspired by the spirit of international competition going on at the first modern Olympics in Athens, a group of German chefs decided to invent an event that’s since become known as the “Culinary Olympics.”
First held in Frankfurt in 1900, the contest only had four countries going for the gold: Italy, Germany, Austro-Hungary, and England. But it’s grown to include 35 nations (Sweden won, most recently), with the notable exception of France—they haven’t participated ever since Team USA beat them back in the ‘70s.
America Makes Things Democratic
While the Culinary Olympics were gaining momentum in Europe, America invented a very different kind of cooking contest—instead of just the elite few going for a national prize, these contests invited whole crowds of common people to compete for individual bragging rights and a cash prize.
The Texas State Fair hosted the first documented chili cook-off in 1952, but the culture didn’t grow into what it is today until a few years later, when a newspaper feud between two Texan chili-heads spilled off the page and into real life.
It started when H. Allen Smith wrote an article in Holiday magazine called “Nobody Knows More About Chili Than I Do,” and was promptly challenged for chili dominance by a Dallas-based journalist named Frank X. Tolbert, a man who had actually written a book on chili, A Bowl of Red. They exchanged heated articles until a couple local citizens offered to let the two hotheads settle their claims in neutral territory—a remote field outside of a small town named Terlingua near the Rio Grande. Today, there are two Terlingua chili fests that bring more than 10,000 people to the desert to vie for the grand prize every year.
A few years after that, the culinary fighting spirit spread east, sparking the hypercompetitive barbecue circuit that’s still growing today, and has inspired countless local variations on the theme.
The Heat Is ON
It took the game show format to really turn competitive cooking into what it is today. The new TV cooking competitions of the ‘90s didn’t just award prizes, they also presented obstacle courses to test the chefs’ endurance—in and out of the kitchen—and quick-thinking as they strived for the top slot. Combine a limited time clock and secret ingredients with running commentary and tough elimination challenges, and the world was introduced to a whole new type of food TV.
Once audiences got a taste of this groundbreaking new format, their old standby shows started to seem a little dull by comparison—viewers became fascinated by the thrill of seeing big-name chefs duke it out in real-time, and the challenges have only gotten more intense and exciting every year.
The__Chase__SapphirePreferred® Grill Challenge at Vegas Uncork’d is the latest in this long line of culinary competitions, bringing all the excitement of the secret ingredient challenge and celebrity chef star power to a live stage in Las Vegas. But the participants in this contest didn’t make any extravagant dishes or show off avant-garde techniques to wow the judges—they demonstrated their tried-and-true grill skills, in the tradition of backyard cooks around the country, which brought the spirit of the competition back to the good ol’ American classic cook-off.
So which team reigned supreme in the third annual Chase Sapphire Preferred® Grill Challenge? Emeril Lagasse and Le Cordon Bleu student Elsa Sabellano Jenstad stole the show with their classic French bouillabaisse, and did a fantastic job of incorporating the secret ingredient—black garlic. For winning first place, Elsa received a $20,000 scholarship from Chase Sapphire Preferred. Congratulations!