Massapequa-raised Vincenzo Loseto competes on 'Top Chef'
Long Island native Vincenzo Loseto competes on "Top Chef" season 22: "They always put you in places where it's stuff you haven't seen or done." Credit: Bravo / Marcus Nilsson
Massapequa-raised Vincenzo Loseto joins the half-dozen or so Long Island natives to compete on Bravo’s "Top Chef" — including past season winners Harold Dieterle (West Babylon), Ilan Hall (Great Neck) and Richard Blais (Uniondale) — when season 22 of the culinary competition premieres Thursday at 9 p.m. Titled "Top Chef: Destination Canada" to avoid confusion with its fellow franchise series "Top Chef: Canada," the season shot last year in Toronto and elsewhere in the neighboring country.
"A lot of friends and colleagues of mine partook in previous seasons," Loseto, who turns 32 next month, told Newsday by video from California, where he is chef de cuisine — second-in-command to the executive chef — at Press Restaurant in the Napa Valley town of St. Helena. He names Brooklynites Danny Garcia, last season’s winner, and Kah-wai "Buddha" Lo, winner of both season 19 and the all-star season 20, as among those who had "just been poking me to do it. They know how competitive I am. And then last year I was just, like, why not?"
He applied online and about a year ago, he says, was picked for this season, vying with 14 others for the show’s biggest grand prize to date: Not only the usual $250,000, a feature in Food & Wine magazine and an appearance at the annual Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, Colorado, but also new perks including $125,000 in flight credits with Delta Air Lines.
The youngest of three sons of Italian immigrant Luigi "Gino" Loseto, a former NYPD officer now with a fare-evasion unit at the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and Dione Loseto, a seamstress and designer, Vincenzo Loseto learned growing up it was OK to take chances in cooking, and sometimes fail.
"My mom cooked just about every night. It is one of those things where she’s a great cook and not the greatest cook at the same time," he says, qualifying that "she's created some of the most nostalgic dishes I can ever eat in my life. Same thing with my father." His parents were supportive from the start, "But as I progress and surpass them, I call them out on all their mistakes, and they don't like it so much," he says, half-joking.
Loseto became serious about a culinary career while attending Massapequa High School and taking cooking classes at the Nassau BOCES school GC Tech, in Levittown. He went on to a bachelor's degree from the Culinary Institute of America, in upstate Hyde Park.
He then worked his way up the ranks at the Manhattan restaurants NoMad and Eleven Madison Park, the latter including an East Hampton summer pop-up, interspersed with an internship at the Copenhagen restaurant Noma. In 2017 he served as an assistant on the team that won the United States its first gold medal in the biennial Bocuse d'Or competition in Lyon, France.
"It’s where I met my current boss," Philip Tessier, chef partner at Press. "He was the coach, and I got to experience four to five months with Team USA" in the Napa Valley. Loseto would join Press in June 2022. His girlfriend, California Department of Fish and Wildlife epidemiologist Liberty Wood, joined him in 2023 after graduating with a master’s degree from Columbia University.
Despite his experience and expertise, "Top Chef" still proved a formidable challenge. "They always put you in places where it's stuff you haven't seen or done," Loseto says. "But the one thing I didn't expect to walk away with were the relationships I have with the other contestants. Everyone was amazing." Although the competitors were rivals, "You're still going through the same experiences. I don’t know if you want to call it trauma bonding, but there's definitely a certain level of that, for sure."
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