Sarah Welch is someone to take the road not taken. She did geographically when she left New York after culinary school to start cooking in Michigan. She was ready to take creative risks on Top Chef, approaching the competition like a “Choose Your Own Adventure” book. And she got many different endings over her time in Houston, finishing in both the top and bottom in the first two Elimination Challenges. Despite that unsteadiness, Sarah went into a paired challenge with Robert Hernandez, hopeful their dynamic would help them get past their hardest challenge yet. Unfortunately, some difficulties in execution made them one of the few teams to miss the mark, ultimately eliminating them. And though Sarah says Top Chef could not “hack the iceberg that is my self-doubt,” her ship sailed more knowledgeable about her cooking and herself. Read on to hear Sarah’s thoughts on her time in the game, and check out Last Chance Kitchen to watch Sarah and other eliminated chefs fight for redemption and a chance to get back into the competition. What compelled you to apply for Top Chef? When you live in the Midwest, you don’t get a lot of opportunities. There are only so many ways you can draw attention to what your business is doing. So we’ve kind of always shot for the moon when it comes to trying to do our best and share with other people what we’re doing. And it just seems to me like a great opportunity to be on a larger platform than what a Michigan chef might normally have. You said you like to cook on the fly, comparing it to a Choose Your Own Adventure. How did that affect the way that you approached the various challenges that were thrown at you on Top Chef? When they were interviewing me for the experience, they were like, “Well, you cook local food. Why do you think that you’d be a good fit?” And I was like, “Well, the beauty and the burden of local food is that you roll with the punches.” Sometimes it rains too much, and you can’t get that thing that you were really hoping for. And on your menu, you have to make it happen. You can’t just not have a salad on your menu for the night. I have always been of the mentality of making it work with what you have. And so that parlays really nicely into the entire Top Chef experience. Because you don’t know if you’re going to have a knife that day, or if you’re going to be using an ax! [Laughs.] I think that my day-to-day experience really helped me mentally approach it as just another day at work. You hit a low point during the Friday Night Lights challenge when your “celebration of chickpea” put you in the bottom and prompted comments from the judges that it was unoriginal. How did that affect you emotionally in the moment? You have to go into the experience like you go into a boot camp workout, knowing that it’s probably going to suck, but you’re going to come out better. I welcomed harsh feedback. And throughout all the seasons, there’s always a disconnect between what you’re asked to do and how you interpret that. There’s this disparity between what you thought you were being asked to do and what you were being asked to do or what they expected you to do. Sometimes that goes really well for you. Sometimes they’re like, “Holy [expletive], you’re a genius.” And sometimes they’re like, “You’re an idiot; you made hummus.” You just don’t know how the pendulum is going to swing for you. And sometimes it went in my favor, and sometimes it didn’t. I think that is the case for everyone. But if you start to get hurt over their feedback, I think you’re doomed for failure because that’s the entire point. You’re signing yourself up for critical feedback. You expressed worry that you were “good at people and not food.” What made you feel that way, to the point where you were discounting your finish in the top in the first episode? Oh, I don’t think it was correlated to being in the bottom at all. My ethos on cooking, what things I put importance on the further I get in my career, has been the community around food with a variety of food available to every human being on this planet. There is no best dish; there is no best food. There is only your interpretation in the moment of that. And so what I am passionate about, what I find myself gravitating more toward as I get further in this industry, is people, how I can learn from other people and impart that information. People that I know in this community have information and data sharing, and the joy comes from that for me. I’m in a situation where you’re not put against each other; there is this camaraderie. My kitchen is entirely collaborative. We all work on menu items together; we’re tasting each other’s food and helping each other think through dishes. That’s the environment that I flourish in that I built for myself. And so to be thrust into an environment where not only can I not rely on other people for feedback, but I’m encouraged not to. Or, in the few times that you do, you end up feeling resentment; the environment is not conducive to what I love about food, which is sharing and fun and community. So I think that was my real realization. Not like, “I suck at making food.” But my way of realizing, “Did I just put myself into an experience that is completely incongruous with everything that I love about this industry?” I know that it came off as, “Oh, I made [expletive].” But it was definitely deeper than that. It was like, “Am I this dumb? Did I just ask my entire team to sacrifice everything at the end of the pandemic for something that like actually doesn’t resonate with what I like and what I care about?” You admit your choice to leave NYC affected how you viewed yourself compared to the competition. Did that perception change over your time on Top Chef? I know that it was a feeling not predicated on the show experience. As kids in the United States and elsewhere, you spend your entire life through the educational system being compared with metrics to other people. We’re set up to do that as people in this country. I think it’s natural to leave the educational system to continue that behavior of “how do I measure up? How am I excelling in my field? Am I pushing myself enough?” I have always been of that mentality. It’s like being my harshest critic. That’s the feeling that I carry with me all the time, that constant pursuit of more. And that’s not just for me; that’s for all of the people that work for me. My pursuit of these opportunities causes a trickle-down within the building. And so, if I’m not pushing myself, then that means all of the people that rely on me to push them are also not getting a fair shake. So I think that that feeling has been a lifelong feeling for me, not just for Top Chef experience feeling. Your fiancé told you to cook similarly to what you would cook at home. Did you take that advice moving forward? It just reminded me that I could pay tribute to people I collaborated with or whom I’ve learned from through the food. And so, looking back at foods that I’ve made in the past, not to impress the judges, but to make it in tribute to the people who taught me that dish or influenced me. It helped me find a community within my little memory bank, which sounds super cheesy. [Laughs.] But that helped me a lot. Because I liked cooking for people with credentials. But part of me was like, “You’re not a part of my community. You’re new to me. Why should I care what you think?” But if I cooked something someone taught me, that meant a lot to me. It makes me want to make them proud and do them justice. So it definitely helped me reframe how I could succeed in the competition instead of just being like, “This is a competition cooking show.” Because I don’t really care about competition in this way. Let’s get into the pairs challenge that eliminated you. Talk to me about your relationship with Robert, and why you picked him as a partner. I think that we just got along really well. It was a natural pairing. At that point in the competition, when you know very little about each other, you just go for the person you’re most comfortable with. You’re going to make the best food when you can be honest with somebody about what you think and not fear retribution for that. I think through the entire process, I was just trying to be very communicative about where my head was at and if he wanted to steer it in a different direction. Our fluid communication made that to be a pretty comfortable process. You decided to make shrimp mousse, despite the lack of comfort from your shellfish allergy. How do you feel about the decision in hindsight? Yeah, they definitely like to play up my shellfish allergy a lot on the show, which I don’t necessarily understand. It’s not that big of a deal! I cook with shrimp all the time, actually. It is one of the proteins that I cook with most often. And that was something that I’ve made a million times. But I think if you put anything through the sill that is Top Chef kitchen, and you never know what’s going to come out. There are so many factors that affect everything you do, from the kitchen equipment you’re using to the timeframe you’re provided. You could have made something a million times like Robert’s panna cotta, and then all of a sudden, the gelatin changes, and it’s a new variable. That is the first thing people forget when they’re witnessing Judges’ Table: All of these things are new. And everything is subject to circumstances for which you have no ability to control. Even if you do screw something up, it’s not like you have the unlimited capacity to go and buy more of that thing and redo it. You have what you have. So it’s not like a restaurant kitchen where if I overcook my shrimp mousse, I can go downstairs and get more shrimp. That’s not an option here. You have to make your bed, and then you get to sleep in it. So when I saw the judges say, “Why did she make a shrimp mousse when she’s allergic to shellfish?” that stuck out. I’ll know if I screwed something up; I’m not going to subject myself to eating it. Like if I overdressed a salad, I’m not going to sit there and eat a whole bowl of overdressed salad. I knew from the moment I pulled that mousse out that it was overcooked. There’s no reason for me to eat a [expletive] load of it to verify that. I feel like the original conversation was, “Yeah, I’m allergic to shellfish. I try not to eat a ton of it when I know it’s already in sauce.” And they took it out of context. Were you surprised to get elimination over Evelyn and Jo? I definitely felt like if it wasn’t a double elimination, it probably would have gone—from top to bottom—Robert, Evelyn, me, Jo. So I think a single elimination would have been Jo going home. But I think when you take the bottom and the top, there’s one successful dish there. Robert and I were in the middle. And in this circumstance, they made the decision to send the middle home, not the top and the bottom. I honestly wasn’t surprised because seeing their emotional reaction to possible elimination was different from how I felt. For me, it was a fun experience. The prospect of being eliminated didn’t jerk me as much. People cried at Judges’ Table, and Robert and I were just like, “Yeah, it sucks.” So I think to a certain extent, that reaction may have lent a misguided perception with the judges of where our investment was. I was invested differently in the competition. I’m there as a professional looking to grow and learn, and be challenged. I’m not emotionally invested and experienced the same way that maybe someone like Evelyn or Jo was at the time. So when push came to shove, I wasn’t super surprised. And I do think that a lot of Judges’ Table is misdirection. We know about as much as the people watching do when we’re getting feedback. You said on the way out you learned a lot in your time on the show. What did you take away from the Top Chef experience? I think, in general, it just solidified my perspective on where I do put importance. Watching other people go on the same journey was like they were learning culinary and pushing themselves culinarily for me. I have never made decisions based on pursuit of accolades; it’s a reason why I left New York. I’ve always made decisions based on wanting to create a lifestyle that I could be really happy and comfortable in. And so I learned in Top Chef and talking to all these other chefs, some of which had done that, and some of which hadn’t. You can see on the show how joyful I am when I’m cooking and how happy I am to be there, success or failure. And I think that’s because of the environment and the relationships that I’ve cultivated with food and with the field that I’m in. And I think leaving Top Chef, I realized my head is in the right place. Because, as I said, anybody can make delicious food. Our parents make delicious food. People at corner stores make delicious food. It’s about more than that for me. Next, check out our interview with Robert Hernandez, who was eliminated in Top Chef Houston Episode 4.
