Top Chef’s Amar Santana Is Living His American Dream

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Amar Santana always wanted to cook, but growing up in the Dominican Republic, he didn’t see a clear path, much less one with stops in the world of reality TV. “I loved cooking,” he says, noting that he preferred it over playing with toys as a child. “I used to take, like, three rocks and make a fire, take a little metal can and bake wild cherries with a little sugar to make it sweet.” But as he got older, he saw a culture in his country where “women did the cooking and the men went to work,” he says. “That’s how I grew up.” It wasn’t until he moved to New York at 13 and saw his mom going to work and his dad staying home and preparing the food that he realized, as he puts it, “It is OK to cook here.”

When it was time for Santana to choose a high school, he wanted to attend a new one outside of his district. “The only way that my guidance counselor could get me into that high school was if I took a program called culinary arts,” he recalls. Around that time, his father was diagnosed with brain cancer and had 32 surgeries before his death. “I was in the hospital after school almost every day,” he says. “The last thing my father said to me was take care of your mother and brother, and I’m still taking care of my mom, and my brother works for me.” In his senior year Santana competed for a scholarship to the Culinary Institute of America and won. “It was the American Dream come true, because I was able to get a full tuition scholarship,” he says. He went on to cook in celebrity chef Charlie Palmer’s restaurants in New York City and California.

But he waited over a decade after Top Chef launched before applying for a spot on the show. “One of my former cooks, Ilan Hall, he went on the show and he won. And I used to say, ‘Oh my God, I’m a better cook than he is,’” Santana says, laughing. “He goes on Top Chef and becomes a celebrity, and I’m actually a little jealous. But I used to tell myself, ‘You don’t speak English very well, so forget about it.’ So I never pursued it.”

But before Season 13, a customer at his globally influenced restaurant Broadway in Laguna Beach, Calif., asked whether he’d ever thought about being on the show. It turned out she was friends with the casting director. “I said, ‘You know what? If I don’t have to wait in line with like 1,000 people, I’ll give it a try,’” Santana, now 42, says. He was on vacation in Morocco when he got a callback, and he told the producers he wasn’t cutting his trip short for a final audition. They offered him a spot on the show anyway. He came in second place.

When the pandemic struck, and restaurants were shut down, Top Chef invited him back on as a judge and, the following season, as a contestant in their first international competition, set in London. He made it to the final six in what many fans consider the most competitive season of the series ever, cementing himself as one of the show’s most talented chefs.

Santana currently runs Broadway as well as Vaca, a Spanish restaurant in Costa Mesa, Calif. As for his future, he’s thinking about returning to his roots. “I think I have a soft spot in my heart that I would like to do fine dining—old-school tablecloth, cheese cart, the whole thing,” he says. “But the other side of me, I want to open a Dominican restaurant. I would like to play music and sell plantains and rice and beans. I would make a lot of money, I think, because I feel like that’s what people want.”