Islip Terrace's Peter Richardson competes on 'Yes, Chef!,' new culinary challenge show

Yes, Islip Terrace! One of your own will be competing in the new NBC culinary challenge "Yes, Chef!," premiering Monday at 10 p.m.

"I was just posting Instagram pictures and then one day somebody hit me up on Instagram and I didn't think it was real," recalls private chef Peter Richardson, who recently turned 24 but has been cooking professionally, he says, since his mid-teens. "All my friends, I was showing them, I was like, ‘Look at this, somebody just DMed [direct messaged] me about going on a cooking show.’ I didn't think it was real for the longest time."

But after learning it was legit, he began the nearly yearlong interview process. "And then one day they just snapped their fingers, my flight was booked and I was, like, wow!"

Hosted by food and home-decor icon Martha Stewart and chef José Andrés, the new show from Magical Elves, the production company behind Bravo’s "Top Chef" franchise and many other reality TV series, "Yes, Chef!" puts 12 contestants nominated by friends and colleagues "through a series of intense culinary challenges designed to test and overcome their personal issues," per the show’s description. That includes "improving their behavior" — which goes with the show’s tagline, "To make a great chef ... They’ll break a few egos." The grand prize is $250,000.

Speaking by phone from Miami, Florida, where he is working at an event all month, Richardson says he began cooking for himself as a teen due to what he calls "a stomach issue" involving foods with high oils. "And after a while I was just, like, ‘I'm really good at this.’" Through a friend, he began cooking at Nicky’s on the Bay in Bay Shore, while still in high school. "I probably shouldn't have even been working yet!" he half-jokes.

He attended Saint Anthony's High School in South Huntington for two years before going on to graduate from East Islip High School in 2019 and earning a 2020 degree from Manhattan’s International Culinary Center. After "six or seven years" at Nicky’s, he cooked at the Melville restaurant Bijou and later at The Halston in the same space, as well as at the Jericho steakhouse Opus. Most recently he was at Revival by Toast in Port Jefferson, which closed last month with plans to reopen in Ronkonkoma.

"I left my mentor," Richardson says sadly of Revival chef Scott Andriani. "He is one of the people I look up to the most. He always told me one thing: Know your worth. And I know I can make more money than" he was making there.

Born in West Islip and raised in Islip Terrace, the son of software engineer Peter A. Richardson and Catherine Richardson, a teacher in the North Babylon School District, the young chef has two siblings: brother Jakob, 21, and sister Julia, 17, who "likes to bake. She has a very mature palette for her age."

After his Miami gig finishes he’s off to an event in Tennessee. "I haven't had one day off since April 7th. I've been working 18 hours every day," he says — a New York brag if ever there were one. "I love what I do and I'm just getting started."