Just after 4:00 a.m. one crisp morning last May, chef Kia Damon rolled out of bed, threw on some clothes, affixed her lucky mauve head scarf, and hurried out the door. Gospel poured from her earphones as her Lyft lurched toward the river. The rush was so real she can’t say for certain whether she remembered to brush her teeth. All the chef knew was that she wasn’t going to be late. Soon she would reach Manhattan, and after that the infamous Chopped kitchen, where an opportunity to win $10,000 before a national television audience awaited her.
Zipping across the bridge, Damon looked out over the still water and thought of home: Not even a full year since leaving Tallahassee to further her career as a chef in New York, she was being whisked away to prove her culinary mastery on one of the nation’s most popular cooking programs. Hmm, she recalls saying to herself with a mixture of apprehension and pride. This is my life.
Chopped is the kind of game show one watches with a blunt between their lips and a bowl of Cherry Garcia slowly melting on the nightstand. It is as mindless as it is predictable — three timed rounds in which contestants cook an appetizer, entrée, and dessert using a pre-selected crop of chaotic basket ingredients. (Picture making dinner with sea beans, frog legs, blood sausage, and candy corn.) Amid the repetitive structure, part of the fun is learning the show’s eccentricities, like that recurring judge Scott Conant would rather eat his own soul patch than raw red onions, or that one could forget their whole soul in the Chopped deep fryer. For just under an hour, Chopped invites you to believe that the world’s worst injustices are melted ice cream or undercooked frittata. It is a welcome distraction, televisual salve.
A common thread among Damon’s many culinary hats is an attention to the liberatory necessity of nourishment — an idea that, for the chef, currently means resisting the siren call of constant production.
For most of her life, Damon’s relationship to the show was as a fan, not an aspiring competitor. “I was definitely someone who enjoyed watching Chopped and heckling and critiquing someone’s grape reduction or whatever,” she tells me. But when it came to possibly vying for the title, the chef couldn’t get past the prospect of losing. “I was always rooting for the gays, the Black folks, and the women,” she says, “But I was never one who was like, I’m going to go on Chopped because I can do that, because honestly, I didn’t think I could do that.”
What changed? Damon points to the months she had spent living in New York. After working in diners and hosting a series of pop-up meals celebrating the work of Black women in the food industry around Tallahassee, the chef moved to the city to take a job as a sous-chef at Lalito, a buzzy restaurant in Chinatown. Just 24 at the time, Damon would become the now-closed eatery’s head chef roughly three months later, just days before her 25th birthday. After that, Damon moved quickly, deftly navigating increased media attention to turn her time at Lalito into a blossoming career as a media-savvy chef. And so when a note from a Chopped casting agent appeared in Damon’s inbox in early 2019, the chef reacted with renewed ambition: “I was like, I’m over here literally doing something that I’d never thought I’d do, so it just seemed like why not,” she recalls. “It was honestly a why not moment.”
Aside from her characteristic sense of abandon — the chef is a double Sagitarian — there was another, deeper reason Damon showed up for that initial casting call, then the second, before finally confirming a date to film the episode: her dad. Ever since she was a kid growing up in Orlando, Kia tells me, “My dad was always the one that was like, ‘You need to go on Chopped. I want to see my princess on Chopped.’”
“They all watched me do the thing — I won,” Damon tells me. “It felt good. The pandemic could not stop those feelings and that experience.”
By the night the episode aired this summer, Damon gathered her family for what would be a surprise Zoom watch party. That joyous evening in August, Damon’s dad got to watch his daughter’s culinary coronation. He got to watch her sail through the appetizer round on the strength of crostini rendered from sausage-stuffed pancakes. He got to watch her pass a gut-wrenching entrée sequence in which she twice overcooked her catfish, surviving barely on the strength of a surprising cherry moonshine sauce. And finally, after a nearly flawless performance in the desert challenge, where Damon hand-beat a strawberry-powder whipped cream to perfection, Damon’s father got to watch his champion become a Chopped champion.
