San Francisco’s Tucker Ricchio is never going back to restaurants. The former Acquerello chef recently banked a quarter of a million bucks after winning Season 2 of Gordon Ramsay’s “Next Level Chef” in May. And she’s using it to further build her brand as the spirited, “food is love” chef everyone was rooting for from the start.
She has big plans for her own show and pop-ups around the country. This week, the Bay Area native, who still finds time to volunteer at the Alameda County Community Food Bank, will host her first pop-up, a wildly creative, multicourse rainbow dinner that’s sure to be the hottest food ticket during Pride.
San Francisco chef Tucker Ricchio is hosting a rainbow-themed dinner for Pride this week. It's a rare opportunity to try the chef's food after she won “Next Level Chef” on Fox.
Jay Maidment/Courtesy of "Next Level Chef"The six-course June 22 dinner ($200-$225) in Oakland will start with stuffed cherry peppers and end with a purple mixed berry tart. Ricchio will showcase her Italian food prowess with cheesy arancini drizzled with Puerto Rican “mayo-ketchup” sauce, a nod to her girlfriend Erika Salazar’s roots, and fresh spinach pasta filled with wagyu beef. More importantly, it will be a rare opportunity to taste Ricchio’s food following her win on the cutthroat reality show where chefs battle it out in three very different kitchens literally stacked on top of each other. Their mission: in 30 seconds, grab ingredients to craft the perfect dish from an elevator-like platform that is lowered, top to bottom, through the kitchens.
Celebrity chef Tucker Ricchio's rainbow Pride dinner in Oakland will include a yellow seared halibut course with squash and yellow bell pepper.
Courtesy of Tucker RicchioRamsay, who was Ricchio’s mentor from the start, may be known for lashing out on “Kitchen Nightmares,” but the British celebrity chef was a teddy bear when it came to her. Ricchio stole the competition with her final dish — a bone-in pork chop drizzled with truffle aioli that she cooked in five minutes less than runners-up Pilar Omega and Chris Spinosa.
“Come here, you!” he said as she flew into his arms for a bear hug. Balloons showered the stage. Ricchio’s parents wiped away tears. “Being the one that discovered Tucker, and now as a winning mentor on this competition, I couldn’t be any happier,” Ramsay said. “This is just the beginning of that young girl’s career.”
What is Ramsay like, you ask? “He is wonderful,” Ricchio told SFGATE. “He’s the typical chef in that we all have those moments where we get scream-y and yell-y. But he’s not outlandishly different from a chef in any other kitchen. And he smells amazing. I don’t know what it is, ladies. Expensive cologne. I got to hug him like three times, and he smells so good.”
Chef Tucker Ricchio of San Francisco with her mentor Gordon Ramsay on Fox’s “Next Level Chef.” Ricchio won the reality show and walked away with $250,000.
Jay Maidment/Courtesy of "Next Level Chef"Ricchio said she wanted to win because representation matters.
“I wanted girls to know you can throw down in the kitchen,” she said after her win, her eyes welling up. “You can be a badass. Work hard, believe in yourself, and you can do anything you want to do.”
Ricchio, who identifies as queer, is a child of Italian and Portuguese immigrants. The 31-year-old grew up in San Jose helping her grandfather tend to the garden and pulling fresh vegetables for her grandmother to weave into Sunday dinners.
“It was nothing extravagant or fancy, but that’s where my love of food came from, learning how to take these simple ingredients and making something with love,” Ricchio said. “On lasagna nights, the entire kitchen would be covered in fresh pasta.”
That love for food always remained, but education and success were important elements of her upbringing, Ricchio said. She pursued a career in medicine, graduating from Chico State with a degree in health sciences. Ricchio was headed for nursing school. But, one night in 2016, she saw San Francisco’s Dominique Crenn on Netflix’s “Chef’s Table.” That changed everything.
“I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen,” she said. “Here was this queer female chef, the first to get three Michelin stars. I said, ‘Nope, we’re actually going to culinary school instead of nursing school.’”
Ricchio graduated at the top of her class and spent the next several years working in restaurants, like Paragary’s in Sacramento and Sons & Daughters, the Michelin-starred restaurant in Nob Hill. In 2017, she took a butcher job at Acquerello, where she eventually rose to sous chef under the tutelage of executive chef Suzette Gresham. Ricchio credits Gresham with elevating her game.
“She really cares about cooks and chefs,” Ricchio said. “She is the OG chef that paved the way for me to have an opportunity to have a seat at this table that is filled with dudes.”
Gresham, who is known for mentoring young chefs, left notes for Ricchio every day: “This feels like it weighs 0.5 ounces more than this one” and “You left a little piece of fishtail on the plate.”
“I appreciated every single note because I saw myself getting better faster, and the other chefs respected me, and I was climbing up the ranks,” Ricchio said. “Because of her, I was able to execute anything at a very high level and to take feedback and criticism in a positive way.”
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In 2019, Ricchio left Acquerello to expand her skills beyond Italian and French cooking. She landed at Pabu, Michael Mina’s izakaya-style Japanese restaurant in the Financial District. After the pandemic hit, she scrambled for work, and the opportunity to try something different came along: teaching virtual classes through Oakland-based, Mark Cuban-backed Truffle Shuffle. Her popular class “Eat Around the World” is about international flavors and techniques — she recently transported students to Puerto Rico to make mofongo — but the charisma you see now wasn’t there in the beginning, Ricchio said.
“I had zero on-screen presence. I looked drunk, like a space cadet,” she said. “But I learned how to speak to people and be engaging, and little did I know it would help me on a [TV] show.”
Working for Truffle Shuffle and interacting with students cemented Ricchio’s decision to stay out of restaurants, at least for now.
“I just feel like in the back of the house you don’t get to interact with your guests or see the smile on people’s faces,” she said. “It ties back to my family and food being love and that connection piece.”
In 2021, a recruiter from “Next Level Chef” reached out to Ricchio and encouraged her to apply for the show. In early 2022, she got the call: Out of thousands of applicants, she was one of 20 being flown to Las Vegas to meet Ramsay. She watched Seasons 1 five times in order to prepare. Filming began in September and wrapped in October.
The finalists on Season 2 of Fox’s “Next Level Chef” included, from left, Christopher Spinosa, San Francisco’s Tucker Ricchio and Pilar Omega.
Jay Maidment/Courtesy of "Next Level Chef"In addition to the cash prize, Ricchio earned a one-year mentorship with Ramsay and the other judges, Richard Blais and Nyesha Arrington. They haven’t told her much about what the mentorship entails, except that she will spend a few months working with each celebrity chef to further her career.
“The goal is for them to help me get to the next level,” she said. “To help me shine as bright as I can.”
In the short term, Ricchio is working as a private chef and hopes to collaborate with her fellow “Next Level Chef” competitors on pop-ups, sharing her love of food with the world. She has become a role model for many young chefs, and her Instagram brims with gushing thanks from her followers.
“I was rooting for you from the start! My little queer chef heart makes me so happy you showcased our community,” one follower wrote. “I really want to follow in your footsteps, to just be myself.”
Ricchio said that every comment warms her heart.
“Being able to represent women and the LGBT community, it makes me want to cry,” she said. “Dominique Crenn inspired me, and to think now I could be her for someone else, I take a lot of pride in holding that role.”
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