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Reality Bites: How Top Chef Contestants Stay Undercover
By Jessica Sidman , Washington City Paper
September 27, 2012
In the fall of 2007, Spike Mendelsohn told everyone he knew he was traveling in Vietnam for six weeks.
In reality, the chef of Good Stuff Eatery and We The Pizza was in Chicago filming Season 4 of Top Chef. The story seemed plausible: He was cooking Vietnamese food at Mai House in New York at the time and often ventured to parts of Southeast Asia where he was unreachable.
Before he left, Mendelsohn wrote a batch of fake emails to his parents: “I was like, ‘Hey, I miss everybody. I’m in Cambodia just hanging out eating fish.’ Another email would be like, ‘Hey, I’m in Laos. I’m living in a treehouse. I really don’t have too much Internet connection.’”
His sister, one of the only people who knew his true whereabouts, logged into his email and sent the messages to his parents every few days. When he returned, Mendelsohn pulled out photos from previous trips to southeast Asia and showed them to his family.“My mother is so nosy and always trying to figure out what I’m up to,” Mendelsohn says. “The idea that I was in Vietnam didn’t really raise any questions.”
