Brynn Weaver Reveals the Nail in the Coffin of her 'MasterChef' Dreams
It has to be harder to turn in your apron on MasterChef when the responsibility isn’t 100 percent your fault, and this week saw two of the show’s stronger cooks eliminated by the dreaded wall challenge, in which they have to produce an identical dish—including plating—with a wall between them so they can't see what their partner is doing.
Last week, Brynn Weaver was flying high. She had won the Immunity Pin and was able to sit out the barbecue challenge, which sent Madam Donut (MD) home. But it also meant that she couldn’t win the challenge—Brynn had won the last Immunity Pin of the season—which put her fate in the hands of the man that did: Wayne Lewis.
The reward for winning the barbecue challenge was getting to pair up the cooks for the wall challenge, and Wayne did his best to eliminate at least one of the strongest players by the decisions he made.
“When Wayne was making the pairs, I was thinking that maybe Kolby [Chandler] and I were almost an afterthought,” Brynn told Parade in this exclusive interview. “We both had been doing pretty well. I felt like it was obvious that Wayne was going to pick Grant for himself. They cooked the same. You knew it was going to be steak and mashed potatoes, and they did amazing with steak and mashed potatoes.”
Wayne’s first choice was to pair Kennedy with Sav. Kennedy is one of the strongest cooks and looks to be headed to the finale, so Wayne tried to pair her with one of the weaker cooks, who he hoped would take her down.
Related: MasterChef’s Lizzie Hartman Predicts the Winner of Season 13
“Sav’s an amazing cook but she hadn't been rising to the top, so maybe he thought that would be a disadvantage for Kennedy,” Brynn says of his decision. “I don't know what he was thinking when he paired Reagan and Jennifer—I know he's had it out for Jennifer, but Reagan and Jennifer speak the same language, they've become such good friends, and I was like, ‘They're going to crush this. They're intuitively connected,’ and they did.”
FOX
Brynn ended up paired with Kolby, who she had never worked with previously, and that worked to their disadvantage when they only had two minutes at the beginning of the challenge to plan their dish, and they didn’t get on the same page.
She continues, “Sav and Kennedy were really smart. Sav said, ‘I'm going to follow Kennedy's lead,’ so Kennedy knew right then and there she was planning it, she was leading it, she was going for it. Like I said, Reagan and Jennifer were like one brain at this point. They're so close and in sync that I don't think they would have to think about it. They both came with the same idea, knowing what they were going to do. Kolby and I struggled a little bit. I had a couple ideas of what would complement how he cooks; he had the same and we didn't have a cohesive concept from the start.”
Even though Gordon Ramsay, Aarón Sánchez and Joe Bastianich took Kolby to task during the critiques because his salmon wasn’t cooked and it was under seasoned, a definite reason why their team was at the bottom, Brynn takes responsibility for her part in their being sent home.
“I think at this point in the competition there's no way to say it's not both teammates’ faults,” she says. “I made mistakes. There were things at the beginning of planning when Kolby was like, ‘I'm going to try doing something you want to do even if I haven't done it.’ That was a bad call. We should have readjusted to do something we were both comfortable with. My sauce was not good. It was a mess. That could have been just as much the nail in the coffin as a messed-up protein at that point, so I wouldn't say that I feel like either one of us had more blame in that scenario. Every choice you make as a team gets you to that final result, so I just don't see it that way. I don't feel that way.”
Related: MasterChef Contestant Charles Says He 'Blacked Out' Going Face-to-Face with Gordon Ramsay
Even as she assumes partial responsibility for her elimination, it still came as a shock after winning immunity the previous week.
“It was,” she owns. “That was my first time being in the bottom for my own dish. I was in the bottom for that first team challenge, and this was my first trip to the bottom for something that I made in the MasterChef kitchen, but again, the margin for error at that point is so low. You can't make a single mistake. Maybe in another competition those mistakes wouldn't have been the end of it for us, but when you're looking at the eight amazing chefs that are left, every little detail is important. It wasn't our day.”
Brynn also talked about what it meant to her to make the Top 8, how working in the restaurant business is her lifelong plan, how the COVID lockdown was her inspiration for auditioning, and what’s next for her.
FOX
You were the last cook from the Northeast and congratulations on making it to the Top 8. What does it mean to make it as far as you did?
Unbelievable. Every step of the way I was like, “Still here today. We're still doing it.” It was almost like a surprise every time. It felt like from the beginning of the application process to as far as I made it, it was like, “Oh, you're kidding me. I'm still doing it.” It was an incredible feeling. I'm very proud of myself. It's a really good feeling to try to do something that crazy, to put yourself out there, to test your limits and still do a pretty dang good job. It feels good.
Related: Richie Jones-Muhammad's MasterChef Dreams Didn't Rise When He Forgot the Baking Powder
In your head, did you already have your finale three dishes planned out?
No, not at all. Like I said, every day was like, “Really?” It had gotten to the point around the Top 10 and then getting that Immunity Pin, I was like, “Oh, my gosh. I think people are looking at me like I have a shot to make it.” I didn't let myself think that way. I wanted to get through every single day. Other people were starting to talk about their dishes. I didn't want to be so bold as to start planning out all the details. I hadn't even let my mind wander that far yet. I had just started to accept it like that day. I was like, “Oh, my gosh. This might be happening for me.” So, at least I don't have this this menu I was so excited to prepare that I never got a chance to do, but maybe it was that thinking that got me in the position. Maybe taking every day one step at a time, I wasn't quite committed enough … maybe if I'd been a little bit more focused on the end goal. I don't know.
I know you have some restaurant experience, but what is it like as a bartender to cook for Gordon Ramsay, Aarón Sánchez and Joe Bastianich?
I was like astounded every time. I have never put my food out there to the public, just my friends, my family, my husband. That I had to go from cooking in my own kitchen to cooking for some of the most famous chefs was astounding. It was crazy. I got to do something that most people, most chefs I know can't say they've done. Gordon Ramsay has tasted my food; he's complimented my food. It's a dream come true really, but at the same time, it's so unreal that I actually get more anxiety now when I cook for my friends and family, or even when I cook … sometimes I do cook in the kitchen now at the restaurant I work at and I have more anxiety about that because Gordon, Aarón and Joe’s standards are so high. If I don't match it, if I'm not that good, I guess I could understand that, but in the real world I'm like, “Man, if I spent all this time cooking my family dinner, trying to make something special for my husband, or putting out food to the public in the restaurant and they don't like it, that's crushing. That's who I'm really cooking for. The idea of working in the back in the restaurant and making a mistake, disappointing a customer, disappointing the other bartenders when they have to send my food back, that's worse.
FOX
What was the most difficult part of being on the show? Was it the team challenges, or when I talked to Lizzie, she said for her it was talking to the chefs while she was trying to cook?
There were a couple. The team challenges are absolutely insane. We all talk over and over when you're cooking, whether it's team challenges or anything, about the pivot. It’s something that happened during the wall challenge as well with Kolby, we did need to pivot. It is so hard to do even on your own in 45 minutes, much less if you have to communicate to anyone else around you. So, the team challenges, if we needed to change something, it had to be figured out, confirmed, and spread between the rest of the teammates in seconds and that is very, very difficult.
The other hardest thing was having the confidence to keep doing it every day. Honestly, do I deserve to be here, and I'm going to do my best today, and that's what I'm putting out. You had to really remove any doubt from yourself to be able to get through that cook because if you overthought it, if you questioned yourself, it was going to fall apart, so you had to find the self-confidence to get through the day. That isn't something I'm used to and that was a little bit of a challenge to say, “OK, this is what I'm doing, I believe in it, I'm going to defend it to Gordon Ramsey and I'm going to make it fun.”
Related: It Was Swiss Meringue Buttercream That Iced Kyle Hopkins MasterChef Dreams of Making the Finale
It was during the COVID lockdown that you really got started cooking. Was that when you said, “I’m going to audition for MasterChef?”
It was actually my husband's idea. He’s just a huge fan, and during lockdown, it was a game of how do I cook what's in my fridge? That felt like a Mystery Box Challenge every time, and it was a blast. I loved it. It’s kind of how I make cocktails. We're working on a menu at work, it's filling in the blanks of: We have a whole bunch leftover of this kind of gin and this fruit’s in season, and we’d really like to have this liqueur on the menu, how do I make that all come together? So, it was just that game, but in my refrigerator and on my stove instead of behind the bar and I loved it.
You do have some previous restaurant experience. How did you get into the culinary profession in the first place?
I started working in coffee at Starbucks as a teenager. I'm originally from Seattle and that was the job every kid had in high school. I kept it up to make my way through college, and then I ended up working at this little vegan cafe that was right next door to a Starbucks I worked at. The owner there is this amazing vegan chef, Makini Howell, and she literally poached me from Starbucks. She was like, “You're a really good worker. Do you want to come work for me next door instead?” And then that spiraled into working at other restaurants, getting my first barbacking when I was 19. I was working full time to pay for school, and I just fell in love with restaurants instead. I was like, “I'm making good money. I enjoy my co-workers. I connect with them differently than I do other college students,” and so I ended up dropping out. I moved to New York at 21 to keep bartending and that's just the career for me. Nothing else has ever made sense. It just feels right to be in the restaurant every night.
FOX
What's next? When Kelsey guested on the stadium food episode, we learned she has managed to parlay her win into a career. Obviously, you didn't win but that doesn't mean that you don't have culinary dreams. What do you hope to achieve?
My love will always be restaurants first. Any aspect of them, the food's important, the bar is important, but for me it's the whole experience. I would rather stay in restaurants than anything else. Right now, I am managing the restaurant I was at before. I stepped into a larger role there and it is so satisfying to me, because for me it's more about the whole experience, the whole team, the whole crew, than it is just my own culinary vision or whatever my vision is behind the bar. A restaurant is like a living organism of so many creative, talented, hard-working people. The place I'm at right now is just a dream—some of the best team members and crewmates—such great work, such great communication, and a real excitement to be there every day. Honestly, I wouldn't change anything about where I'm at at the moment. It's so satisfying. Day-to-day, I could be behind the bar, I could be helping out in the kitchen, I could be doing my orders, I could be on the host stand, I could be at the dish station, and it doesn't matter. It's all to the end of a successful night in the restaurant and that feels so good.
Related: Processed Food Proved Lethal for MasterChef's Nina Interlandi Bell
The field is very narrow now. Who do you see making it into the finale of those people that are left?
It's so hard to say. I said something in the barbecue challenge that the people who have been way up on the top have been like this [indicates up and down] and you can see it happened to me. Kolby and I were strong and steady, and we got knocked out. So, I think Reagan is worth keeping an eye on. She has not made a mistake. She hasn't put herself out there and really pressed too hard. She's been consistent and she's shown her consistency straight through. She doesn't mess up. I think she's one worth keeping an eye on. I think Wayne we could worry about. Again, he's volatile. He's a very talented chef but sometimes he swings and misses. And then, of course, Kennedy is just raw talent. She's definitely worth keeping an eye on.
MasterChef airs Wednesday nights at 8 p.m. ET/PT on FOX.