His participation was not for nothing. After a successful first season as a juror on “Top Chef”, two-star chef Stéphanie Le Quellec will return for season 16. According to “Le Parisien”, “filming of the first episode has just started this Monday in Paris, on the terrace of 7e Ciel, at Printemps Haussmann. “I am very happy to be back”, she confides in the columns of the daily, assuring “having had a lot of fun” last season. “The broadcast finished, the production asked me if I wanted to do another season, I said yes, it happened naturally”, she explains.
“Yes, I want to keep the title”
“Yes, I want to keep the title”she said again. Indeed, last year, the Blue team she supervised triumphed thanks to the victory of Jorick Dorignac, who has since become executive chef of his brigade leader’s restaurants. Building on this experience, the winner of season 2, broadcast in 2011, therefore wants to continue to bring her taste for a job well done in the famous M6 culinary competition. Stéphanie Le Quellec will be reunited this season with her colleagues Philippe Etchebest, Hélène Darroze, Glenn Viel and Paul Pairet, who are also returning this year.
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The only notable change this season is the departure of Dominique Crenn, three-star chef, who is leaving the show after just one year of participation. Based in the United States, where she runs a Michelin-starred restaurant in San Francisco, the Breton chef, who brought her modern and avant-garde vision of cuisine to the program, had to increase the number of return trips between the Californian city and Paris to respect his professional commitments while taking part in filming.
Return to one brigade per leader?
Invited during this 15th anniversary season, she joined Hélène Darroze and Stéphanie Le Quellec in a joint team led by the female chefs, which faced that of the men. In this new and 16th edition, there will therefore be only five jurors, and should therefore return to a system of five brigades from the start. “We start filming without really knowing, we will discover as we go along, it allows us to maintain a certain spontaneity. But since we have reduced the number of jurors to an odd number, I think we are moving towards that”explained Stéphanie Le Quellec.
The chef, also winner of the “Clash of Champions” in 2011, expects to be in the sights of her comrades. “I’m probably going to get carried away a little, last year I was last and I took the victory, they’ll be keen to regain the title… There’s a healthy competition between us, I think that we’re still going to have fun”, she concludes.
