Worst Day on the Job: When Esquimalt chef Andrea Alridge got cooked on Top Chef Canada

Andrea Alridge has cooked in some iconic kitchens around Vancouver. She started off at Cactus Club Cafe at 15 years old before serving as head chef at CinCin Ristorante and Osteria Savio Volpe. As she steps into her new role as executive chef at Janevca Kitchen and Lounge in Esquimalt, Alridge recalls the ups and downs that led her here—including a picnic challenge on Top Chef Canada that turned out to be no walk in the park.

It’s like serious PTSD. It was episode two of season nine of Top Chef Canada, and we were tasked with a picnic challenge. We were put into groups and we had to build a menu out of the ingredients they had given to us. Our group had apples.

It was a beautiful day. We got to go out to the farms. Everyone had so much fun. My team felt really proud of what they were going to do. All four of us felt like we could execute well. And when it was time for our presentation… we fell short, to say the least.

We got ripped apart. A lot of it didn’t quite make sense. My dish, specifically, was a chicken liver mousse with an apple gel, and then an apple mostarda. I thought it would have been really nice with a picnic. But I didn’t get the cook on it right and didn’t really hit the mark for everyone when it came to the flavours.

When you’re cooking on the show, everything is misplaced. You don’t know where things are all the time: you’re running back and forth, you’ve got ovens that are 50 feet away from you, your workbench is on the opposite side of the space. Your ingredients are spread all over the place, you’re fighting with other people for pieces of equipment and you have this huge looming clock in front of you that’s just counting down continuously. None of that really happens in a normal kitchen.

I was scrambling to get the gel set on time. I would say it literally just set, and packing the dish into the basket, I felt very confident. I tasted everything. Flavour-wise, it was good. It ate well. But after sitting for an hour and a half… when I presented the dish, I knew instantly that the judges were going to hate it. The gel hadn’t set properly, the pâté was oxidizing. It moved around in the container a little bit.

And it was really, really hard—not to take the criticism, but to stand at the judges’ table knowing that I was the only person at fault there. I didn’t manage my time ­pro­perly; I didn’t manage the ingredients well. I just failed.

To only get to episode two and potentially go home… yeah, it was devastating. But, luckily, I didn’t. I was in the bottom, and it was between me and my other partner, Jae-Anthony, and I guess his dish missed the mark just that much more. I was saved by the skin of my teeth.

Once we got back to our hotel rooms, I completely broke down. But I did really think about all the mistakes I had made and all the critiques the judges had given me. I absorbed all of that, let it go, and really thought, “Okay, if I want to do well in this competition and if I want to stay, and to win, I need to rethink how I’m doing things.” And that’s when it really clicked for me: I shouldn’t be overthinking things or overanalyzing. I should just enjoy what I’m doing and cook from my heart, because that’s when I know I do my best. If you’re not enjoying something, you’re never going to get the best result. That’s a big thing that I took from the experience, and, obviously, time management was another.

The next challenge was called the holiday challenge. We had to make a dish that would commemorate our family holiday meals. I did a braised oxtail dish that my grandmother in Jamaica had cooked all the time, but I took a lot of elements from my Lola on my mom’s side, the Filipino side. I married the two. I was determined to be in the top half of the competition for that challenge—and I made it happen.

I learned a lot of things from Top Chef. I think the biggest thing is to have confidence—like, if you really, truly believe in yourself, you can make anything happen. Filming went on for eight weeks and I made it to the finale. One episode will not define your career, and one mistake does not answer who you are as a chef, what you believe in or what your ethos is. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter.

This interview has been edited and condensed.