When Season 3 of Bravo’s Top Chef premieres on June 13, lesbian viewers will have one of their own to root for again: 39-year-old Sandee Birdsong. (And, much like last season’s Josie Smith-Malave, she’s the Top Chef hopeful with the snazzy haircut.)
Originally from St. Simons Island, Ga., Birdsong now lives in Miami, the city hosting this season’s competition. She is a self-taught chef, as are seven of the other competitors (there are 15 in all to begin with). But don’t let that fool you into thinking there are any amateurs here.
“The new chefs bring an undeniably high level of talent and expertise to the table this season,” said head judge Tom Colicchio in a press release, and Birdsong concurred.
“The caliber of chefs that they got for this season is absolutely fantastic,” she told AfterEllen.com. “The skill level is amazing! Everybody was so confident in their ability, and that was great because it really took this show to another level.”
The show’s producers have found creative new ways to test the chefs’ abilities this season. In the first episode, for instance, the competitors are just getting to know each other over hors d’oeuvres and champagne at the former Versace mansion when ever-smiling host Padma Lakshmi informs them that they have 15 minutes to assemble an amuse bouche from whatever buffet items have survived their grazing. Later they face an elimination challenge involving a grisly array of glistening “proteins” that can’t possibly be easy to work with, let alone stomach.
But these are precisely the kinds of punishing challenges these foodies signed up for. And Birdsong is no stranger to challenge.
Though she worked for 15 years as a personal chef, Birdsong had no commercial kitchen experience when she first began to work at Tantra, the Miami restaurant she now headlines. She simply stopped in one day and – thanks to her sheer passion and persuasiveness – convinced the head chef at the time to give her a shot, even though the only thing she could claim to know about the profession was that it was her calling.
He offered her three days without pay as a line cook. Within just two weeks, he was so impressed that he made her kitchen manager.
Birdsong is now executive chef at Tantra, a fine dining establishment that serves “aphrodisiac cuisine” and has grass-covered floors, flowing-water walls and ceilings decorated with fiber-optic shooting stars. It’s the only restaurant she has ever worked in.
“If you go to culinary school, you automatically get to learn the A-to-Z of cooking, and that was something I don’t really have under my belt,” Birdsong admitted. “I’m having to learn it from trial and error, and books.” She has read every culinary-themed book she’s managed to get her hands on.
If other Top Chef contestants underestimated Birdsong because she lacks formal training, it only worked to her advantage, she said. She happens to be a third-degree black belt in karate, a sport that taught her never to underestimate her opponents. “Every time I went into a match and thought, ‘Oh yeah, she looks easy to beat,’ that was always the one that kicked my ass,” she said.
Luckily the Top Chef team was persistent in its efforts to recruit Birdsong for Season 3, because she didn’t get back to them after they left several voicemails and emails. “But one night I was in the kitchen, and my phone was ringing in my pocket,” she recalled, “and I just grabbed it without looking at the number. I answered it and it was them. They convinced me to come talk to them, and I guess I made the cut.”
By that time the competition was set to begin in just a couple of weeks, so Birdsong did the one thing she could do to prepare: She bought 30 pairs of underwear. “You’re going for so long and you might not be able to wash your clothes,” she explained.
On this season’s Top Chef, Colicchio and Gail Simmons return as judges and are joined by Ted Allen, the food expert from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Birdsong pointed out another challenging aspect of the competition: “The judges all have their own tastes and they like totally different things! They have different palates and you find that out almost immediately based on the comments they make. It’s tough.”
One of the biggest challenges Top Chef presented for Birdsong was not being in control. “You surrender yourself to that environment, and every single thing that you do, you have to ask about it,” she said. “And there are things that you can’t do, and everything’s on a time schedule. That was probably the hardest.”
But spending 30 days away from home — or, more specifically, away from her sweetheart and her pooch — may have been even harder. “I’ve been with my girlfriend for 12 years now,” she said. “We were apart for 10 days at the beginning, but that was it. And my dog I’ve never been away from for that long.”
Before meeting her partner, Birdsong was married to a man — right from the time she graduated high school. “I was never around anyone gay, so I didn’t really know I was in the closet, if that makes sense,” she explained. “I didn’t know who I was. I was married nine years before I had an experience with a woman, and two weeks later I was divorced.” She’s been with that woman ever since.
While most of the Top Chef competitors came from out of state, Birdsong was already based in Miami. This meant that she was highly likely to run into people she knew while shooting the series, which was tricky considering that one of the show’s rules is that contestants can’t talk to anyone outside the competition. “I was shopping in the grocery store and people ran into me and I’d say, ‘No, no! You gotta go away!'” she recalled.
On top of that, she was a little disappointed that she didn’t get to visit a different city: “I wanted to go somewhere! I’m in Miami every day.” But she is nothing if not enthusiastic about taking part in Top Chef. In fact, this woman seems to exude enthusiasm across the board. “I’ve got a Cherokee Indian bloodline and a pirate bloodline, so that’s where my spirit comes from,” she commented.
Besides being an executive chef, Birdsong owns a monthly South Florida lesbian magazine called She. Ten years ago she played a more active role in producing the magazine, but now she likens her role to that of a silent partner.
She is also collaborating with some other women on a project to supply local schools — both public and private — with healthy, organic meals. “The school lunches are absolutely horrible,” she noted. “I know if I had a kid in school I’d pack their lunch every day. But parents don’t have time to do that.” So she hopes to provide a nutritious and conveniently delivered alternative.
Who knows? Perhaps she also has plans to open a restaurant with the $100,000 in seed money she may have won as Top Chef — although she wasn’t at liberty to say how she did in the competition. We’ll have to wait and see.
The third season of Top Chef premieres Wednesday, June 13, at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on Bravo.
