Top Chef: California
season of television series
Top Chef: California is the thirteenth season of the American reality television series Top Chef. The season was announced by Bravo on April 14, 2015. Similar to Top Chef: Texas, filming took place in several locations across California, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, Oakland, and the greater Palm Springs area, concluding with a finale in Las Vegas, Nevada. Top Chef: California had a two-night premiere on December 2–3, 2015. Host Padma Lakshmi and head judge Tom Colicchio returned, alongside judges Gail Simmons, Emeril Lagasse, and Richard Blais, among others. The companion web series, Top Chef: Last Chance Kitchen, also returned, premiering immediately following the second part of the season premiere on December 3, 2015. In the season finale, Jeremy Ford was declared the winner over runner-up Amar Santana. Isaac Toups was voted Fan Favorite.
Contestants
Seventeen chefs competed in Top Chef: California, which included one returning contestant, Grayson Schmitz, who originally competed in Top Chef: Texas.
Kwame Onwuachi returned for Top Chef: Colorado, competing in the Last Chance Kitchen.
“Top Chef: California” enters the record as season of television series. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Chef, California and season can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q21680743. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2015.
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This entry incorporates text from “Top Chef: California” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.