![]() ![]() At the start, it seemed clear that Faison would be remembered, more than anything, as a nasty woman.įast-forward more than a decade, and Faison is back in Boston, where she lived before the show. The Washington Post even listed “massive hatred toward season one runner-up Tiffani Faison” as a standout example of the drama that made Top Chef irresistible to audiences. She did, however, gain a kind of infamy-cast as the villain by the show’s producers, labeled a “bitch” by a fellow cast member, and reviled by viewers who tuned in each week. When Faison appeared, she solemnly declared, “I’m not here to make friends.… I’m here to win.”Īfter 12 grueling episodes, she didn’t win, finishing second among a dozen competitors. Faison stiffened her collar and cocked her shoulders back in a stance that clearly said, “Don’t mess with me.” In the first moments of the show, as contestants checked out the new digs they would share in San Francisco throughout the season, there was some cheerful small talk. Some contestants smiled, one flipped her long hair over her shoulders, and another gracefully laid her white kitchen coat over her forearm with the solicitousness of a server. ![]() ![]() Faison introduced herself to the world during the opening credits of Top Chef season one in 2006. I might have gone with “Fighter.” Because the undisputed queen of the Fenway restaurant scene has had to go to bat for herself a lot in life, both personally and professionally. She recently took a wildly accurate personality test, she says, one of those predictive-behavior indexes that corporations use to evaluate management style and assign an easy label. Somewhere around the third or fourth visit from the dim sum cart, she tells me-sort of. So as I wait for the former Top Chef contestant to join me at Hei La Moon, her favorite lunch spot in Chinatown, I wonder how the mercurial food-world personality would want me to see her. But more important, the first thing I learned about Faison that day was that she is very careful about the way she lets others present her to the world, even when she’s only playing pretend. I put them on my credit card and prayed the price tags stayed on. It was going to be fun! It was sure to be a hoot! Until, utterly unimpressed by the wardrobe a stylist had pulled for her shoot, she marched me around Saks to find spiffier threads. ![]() Faison, by this point known nationally as a fierce firebrand of a chef and most often found sporting a grease-stained cook’s coat, decided to pose, tongue firmly in cheek, in the garb of a genteel lady of leisure at high teatime. I had organized a cover shoot of Boston notables dressed up as the fantasy personas they wanted to embody for a day. Granted, I was a green, twentysomething editor and she was a TV celebrity. The first time I met Tiffani Faison, I found her totally intimidating. ![]()
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