Javauneeka Jacobs, the 27-year-old sous chef at Frontera Grill, is good at keeping secrets. She beat 16 chefs in Chopped, one of the Food Network’s longest running food competitions, to be crowned the winner of the Julia Child–themed challenge — and kept it under wraps for the last year.
“It wasn’t hard at all because nobody knew where I was going,” Jacobs says about last year’s trip to New York to record the show. “I just said ‘I’m going on vacation’ and nobody asked any questions.”
One person she couldn’t get away with not telling? Her boss, Rick Bayless. She had grown close to him during the first year of the pandemic while working as his culinary assistant for his YouTube cooking channel.
“I was a little nervous because I don’t know what the reaction would be,” Jacobs says. “I told him I had an opportunity to participate in a televised cooking competition and he was so excited. He set an hour-long meeting for us to sit and talk. I thought that was really cool.”
The competition features 16 chefs facing off in three rounds to make an appetizer, an entree, and a dessert. Each round begins with the chefs receiving a basket of four mystery ingredients that they have to incorporate into their dishes. Chefs have no more than 30 minutes to prep, cook, and plate four dishes (three for the judges to taste and one to be critiqued on its looks). For this season of Chopped: Julia Child’s Kitchen, the judges included chefs Amanda Freitag and Michael Voltaggio alongside Isabella Rossellini, who stars in Julia, the HBO Max series on Child.
Jacobs had grown up with an interest in agriculture and horticulture, but it was a childhood friend from Zacatecas, Mexico, who sparked her curiosity for cooking. “The first time I went over to her house, her mom was cleaning nopales but I had no idea what that was,” Jacobs recalls. “I was asking her questions and helping her clean them. I had no idea what onion and cilantro were until I had them on a taco that her mom made and I thought, ‘Man, this is the best thing in the world.’”
Jacobs was in fifth grade at the time and spent her free time watching the show she would go on to win nearly two decades later. After high school, she decided to pursue a culinary career and enrolled at Le Cordon Bleu, enduring the four-hour round trip each day for two years. She wanted to work in a restaurant that “fit her morals regardless of what cuisine they were serving” and mutual interest from Xoco resulted in her first kitchen job: She liked that they were working with local farmers. “I come from a small farm so that meant a lot to me,” she says.
From there, Jacobs did a stint at Disney World before moving around the Frontera restaurant group. She went to Frontera Grill, then Topolobampo, where she worked the line at the shellfish station (despite having a severe shellfish allergy that can send her into anaphylactic shock) to gain experience in a Michelin-starred restaurant. Eventually, she settled into the kitchen team at Frontera. “It was very important to me to get into a restaurant that was always creating different things,” she says. “We’re changing the menu there every four weeks.”
The practice of executing an ever-evolving menu at Frontera and the training she received from Bayless is what Jacobs credits with her ability to win Chopped. “I’d never done any work like that before,” says Jacobs. “He taught me his style of writing recipes, how to shop at the grocery store, and how to test the recipes, to the point where I could do [the work] by myself.”
Before the competition, the two sat down and brainstormed possible dishes. “Going into a competition like that you have to have some kind of plan,” she says. “I’m a savory chef, and I don’t really cook a lot of desserts. [Bayless] gave me quick recipes for crepes. We can’t use any recipes on the show, so I took the recipe and memorized it.” She used that recipe in the dessert round to create an ostrich egg crepe topped with chocolate coffee mousse and a raspberry orange sauce.
“Having worked in the restaurant and food television industries for the last 37 years, it was not a question of if I was going to help Javauneeka, but how,” says Bayless via email. “Many kitchens are built in such a way that discourages younger chefs from growing and having their moment to shine — I have worked for years with my team to break away from that part of the classical kitchen mold.”
Jacobs went to film the show during the first week of November 2022. She received a “you got this” text from Bayless the first day of competition, and a few days later returned to Chicago a winner — but unable to tell anyone. “The anticipation of waiting for the network to send me an email and say ‘Your show is finally coming out,’ was the hardest part,” she says. “They finally reached out a week before it aired.”
The first episode aired November 23. For the entrée episode, Jacobs whipped up a cassoulet from a can of cannellini beans (a fancier, Mexican version is available on the menu at Frontera through mid-January). At a finale watch party on December 12, Jacobs witnessed friends and co-workers (including Bayless) ride a roller coaster of emotions when editing made it appear like she might lose. Being the only woman and person of color in the finale added an extra layer of significance to her journey.
“I didn’t really think about it till afterwards, because I just wanted to cook,” says Jacobs. “I was one of those little girls who used to watch Chopped, and I didn’t see a bunch of [people like] me on there. And I just want [little girls like me] to know that I can do it, and you can do it too.”