Who is Amanda Turner? 'Top Chef' Season 21 contestant has worked with Bravo show's Season 9 winner Paul Qui
AUSTIN, TEXAS: 'Top Chef' Season 21 contestant Amanda Turner is a chef and a restaurant owner from Arlington. She currently resides in Austin and works as Chef de Cuisine at Olamaie.
Amanda has become a culinary star with over a decade of experience in cooking. She has also been involved in the Austin culinary community and worked for many esteemed chefs, including Uchi's chef Tyson Cole and 'Top Chef' Season 9 winner Paul Qui.
Bravo show chef was a gamer when she moved to Austin and eventually becoming a chef became her priority. She kicked off her culinary career in 2006 at an Olive Garden in Tyler, Texas. She later studied at Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts in Austin in 2009.
Amanda's expertise expanded everything from Japanese cuisine, pasta, and pastry, to whole animal butchery.
According to her Bravo profile, Amanda continued her education in 2017 after she received the Mentor BKB grant, allowing her to cook in Japan for four months at DEN and Ryugin.
However, the Bravo show contestant revealed that Paul inspired her to apply for 'Top Chef'. In a recent interview, Amanda shared, "I worked for Paul Qui, who was a season nine winner. He was my first chef. So I was working for him at the time that he was going through this whole process of being on the show and what it meant and everything."
'Top Chef' Season 21 star Amanda Turner dubs herself a 'nerd'
'Top Chef' Season 21 contestant Amanda Turner called herself a 'nerd' and a gamer in a preview of the upcoming Bravo show. She also added, "I'm a Biracial Balck Woman." She claimed that "representation matters a lot" and participating in the Bravo show "just feels like it's my destiny."
She has defined her cooking style as 'chaos cooking'. Despite being a self-proclaimed 'nerd', Amanda has earned multiple works for her excellent work.
In 2022, Amanda clinched the James Beard semifinalist award for Emerging Chef. The Bravo chef has also earned StarChefs' Rising Star in 2023 and CultureMap's Tastemaker Chef of the Year in 2023.
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How much does 'Top Chef' Season 21 star Amanda Turner get paid?
'Top Chef' Season 21 contestant Amanda Turner worked as Chef de Cuisine in 2021 and was paid $17 an hour. In a career announcement Instagram post, Amanda claimed she had to work for four days a week. Amanda's extraordinary cooking skills and achievements must have raised her paycheck.
Amanda always wanted to represent her culture at the restaurants as she has been a "descendant of Southern culture on both sides of my family."
She revealed in an Instagram post that she had spent most of her career "treating southern cuisine like my personal anathema." The Bravo show star explained, "The association with Black people, and women in particular I felt haunted me throughout my early culinary career."
'Top Chef' star added, "Southern and soul food was the expectation that was put upon me by others (in a way that felt stereotypical), and as is my personality, I made it my mission to learn any other style of cuisine, almost as an act of defiance."
'Top Chef' Season 21 will premiere on Wednesday, March 20 at 9 pm ET on Bravo.