'Top Chef: World All-Stars' Winner Buddha Lo Breaks Down His Historic Victory

In retrospect, Buddha Lo really is a "world all-star" in every sense of the phrase. He grew up in a household of a Malaysian mother and a father from Hong Kong, the latter of whom immersed him in the culinary world from an early age. He was born and raised in Australia. He spent a chunk of his career in London, cooking under chef Gordon Ramsay. And eventually, he packed it all up and moved to America, where he was brought onto Top Chef. So it's only appropriate, then, that he be crowned the first-ever "Top Chef World All-Star" after an incredibly impressive performance all season.

Buddha apparently only had three months to prep for his second Top Chef season. But that doesn't mean he couldn't apply his trademark thinking and preparation for his back-to-back stint, including memorizing recipes for as many English dishes as he could and bringing thousands of dollars worth of molds. And in a season filled with standouts from Top Chef series around the world, Buddha was its MVP. He won a staggering eight challenges, a third of the total challenges across the season. His victories ranged from conquering the arduous "Battle of the Wellingtons" to being the only one to truly pull off a difficult "trompe-l’?il" dish to winning Restaurant Wars in front of his previous co-worker and mentor Clare Smyth. But despite the staggering record, Buddha didn't rest when it came to the final dinner. He channeled all parts of his globe-trotting background in his four-course meal to highlight both himself and the season's concept. And his work paid off handily, as he became the first cheftestant in Top Chef history to not only win twice, but back-to-back at that.

The day after the airing of the finale, Buddha spoke with Parade.com about what he thought his chances of victory were, the highs and lows of his season, his response to critiques of his food "lacking soul," and his reaction to Padma Lakshmi leaving the show after this season.

Related: Everything You Need to Know About Top Chef Season 20

Of course, I have to start by wishing you congratulations for an outstanding season and setting a Top Chef record! How are you feeling right now that you got to relive the victory by watching it back?
It's a huge sigh of relief. It's a very hard secret to keep. The first thing that you want to do is scream and tell everyone what happened. This was filmed in October. The news is out. We've got my family here, and we had a great time. And it's just been an amazing couple of days.

I can only imagine. Now let's go back to October to that final meal. How good of a chance you think you had after winning, especially after the judges' comments to you, Gabri, and Sara?
I all looked very tight. I think everyone had a really, really good chance of winning. It's hard to say. Sara did have a liver problem. And it kind of makes one course redundant. If you score three 10's, and someone else scores four 8's, that's still 32 over 30. So, it's a very hard way to judge. I didn't get to taste any of their dishes. But it was a very tight finale, for sure.

You are someone who always puts so much thought and preparation into your dishes. Was your concept of highlighting all the different nationalities from your background something you always had in your head, or did it develop as the season went along?
I said in season 19, my golden rule is, if I made the finale, I'm not going to just do dishes because I like them. Or saying, "I would have liked these amazing dishes that would have been in the finale, but it just didn't tie into anything that made sense." Why would I have put it on there? Even though it could have been a great menu, it didn't say anything about the significance of who I am or why I put these dishes up in front of these esteemed judges or chefs.

So I really had to deep dive into a couple of different menus. But I thought this one was one that sung at the most, just saying who am I as a chef and what I represent. We call it the World Cup, the Olympics of cooking. And when you go into World Cup ofcooking, you're generally always representing one area. If you go to the Olympics, you're Team U.S.A. But I I just don't feel like that in terms of my cooking. I represent the U.S. Top Chef franchise, I'm Australian, and my parents are from Hong Kong and Malaysia. So I want to be able to represent all of that onto the table, as opposed to just representing one style, because that's not who I am. I wanted to put myself out there.

And you did so extremely effectively! Let's talk sous chefs. You were gifted Ali, and we didn't get to see a lot of your dynamic. Talk to me about what that was like, especially since he had just been eliminated, and there's a world where you could have been competing against him instead of alongside him.
So it's a hard way to put it. You have someone that's just come off very recently. I'd be gutted as well if I got eliminated just before the finale, and now I'm helping someone else make their finale meal. I think any chef in the competition will feel that way. I feel like Tom and Amar had a lot more time to digest everything. It's always hard getting the last person. I feel like that's why no one really picked Damarr on Houston, because it's just too fresh. He came all the way to Tucson, but he didn't get to cook his finale meal. Do we feel like he's mentally capable? That's why when I had Jackson here in Houston, he came out guns blazing, because he had a lot of time to really digest it and go, "I want to show up and show what I can do." So it's very different. But at the end of the day, Ali's an incredible chef and I'm so lucky to have him. And realistically, I was always drawing up all these different sort of plans of whoever would be my sous chef. I would have been happy with any of them, really.

Let's talk about preparation. I read an interview where I believe you said you had three months between the conclusion of Houston airing and you going out to film World All-Stars. When you knew you were competing again, did you have time to do any specific prep? Or was this time more of an "I've done this before, I'll go with my gut" type of feeling?
I said that I watched a couple of seasons of Top Chef U.S. last time going into Houston. But I think that already knowing how everything goes because I've done it before, that was not really the case. I didn't have to look into those previous seasons anymore. I then had to start looking into the competition around the world and see what caliber they are. If you watch some of the Top Chef: France challenges, they're just unreal. I believe the "trompe-l’?il" challenge was inspired by France. Even the doppelgangers, which is probably one of the most iconic episodes, also came from France. They do this very high caliber cooking, and studying the competition was very important. Even though I could not pick out who was going to be on it. Because if you break down ten iterations, that's already like 160 chefs from France.

So then stopped looking at that and said, "Look, I don't have to look at the competition. You don't have to watch Top Chef U.S. I think you just need a really deep dive into British food and really study it up." I bought a book on traditional British cookery. I looked at all the dishes and made sure that I was familiar with all of them. And as soon as we get our books [on set], we have so much time off, I wrote down every single dish that I could remember that's English. Scotch egg, haggis, white pudding, black pudding. And I asked, "What can I do with these dishes?" That's what I would exercise my brain into thinking, "If there was a British challenge like this, how can I do this?" Because that's the only real advantage that you can have in a show. Yes, you can study British food as much as you want. But then you can't study for having a street food challenge. You can't study for having an emoji challenge. Those sort of things that are gonna throw you off. But as much as you can, you've just got to try and prepare yourself.

And I'm kind of lucky that I used to work in London. But there are other people that also worked in London. If you look at Luciana, she worked there for eight years. I actually think she's a British citizen. So in terms of having British knowledge, it depends on what you do with it at the end of the day. I think studying and preparation only makes up for 25% of your success on Top Chef. I've been cooking since I was 12 years old. I started my mom and dad's Chinese restaurant. I've worked in hotels. I've just been doing cooking, cooking, cooking since I was 12 years old. It's not something you can study in three months. It's an accumulation of saying goodbye to my girlfriend--who's now my wife--ten years ago with my dog and saying, "I'm getting on a plane to England and I'm gonna go work massive amount of hours at Gordon Ramsay's." There's the sort of commitment and sacrifices that I put into investing in learning. So I think that those are all things that tribute to the success of World All-Stars.

Related: Padma Lakshmi Exiting 'Top Chef' Following Season 20

You threw out a percentage before. I'll throw one back at you. You won eight challenges this season, literally 33%. What was your reaction at the time? Because not only did you exceed the number you won in Houston, but you also did it against some of the best to ever compete.
I think the mentality for any sort of competition is, "I'm not going in it to just participate. I really do want to win it." And if I want to win, I want to make sure that I solidify why I'm winning. I don't want to get to the end and have maybe a couple of wins and then take it out. I want to not only win, but I want to prove why I won. And every single challenge, I brought my A-game. And sometimes I failed; I got in the bottom twice for two eliminations. But I tried my best in every single challenge to push myself and hope for the best. And sometimes, it will get you a win; sometimes it might even get you in the top three. And sometimes you might end up in the bottom on a bad day. So it's just very lucky and fortunate that my dish was the best out of those times.

But there are some things that you can really plan and really push yourself. I think when Clare was on the show, I was like, "Not only does our team have to win, I have to win this individually." And to try and manipulate that in one of the toughest seasons in Top Chef, and then throw that with Restaurant Wars being arguably one of the hardest challenges in the season, and to try and win as a team and individually, that's a very hard thing to pull off. (Laughs.) But if you put yourself out there enough, you're either gonna get eliminated or you're gonna win. And I put myself into that sort of gamble.

You talk about finishing on the bottom. I want to go back to you in the Vrbo challenge, where you were clearly unhappy with the way the judges saw your dish, to the point where you asked, "Am I on Top Chef, or am I on Top Home Cook?" Talk me through what you were going through during one of those rare moments where it felt you broke your usual cheerful demeanor.
It's very hard. Looking back at it, I definitely throw a little bit of a bit of a tantrum, I would say. It's really hard because when you mix the combination of tasting everyone's dishes, as well as the challenge in hand, I was kind of confused. I felt like they didn't understand the dish, even though they said it in front of me. And, yeah, it's hard because there were two different salmon dishes. One was probably underseasoned where the judges were, and then Amar, on the other hand, was saying that his salmon dish was the favorite of the challenge and Amar won the challenge. So it's very hard to pick what was underseasoned. I didn't know, because the one that we had was pretty good.

But you have a bad day. And sometimes you have a reaction that you don't want. And that's just kind of being a human. But the best thing to do from that is to get yourself back up and keep pushing on and not let that get into your head. Because being in the bottom is actually one of the most mentally hard things that you can do. And so that's why I can give props to Gabri for bouncing back and making it all the way to the finale. Because you'll see a rhythm in Top Chef where the bottom gets in your head, and then you eventually find yourself getting out of it if you keep getting onto the bottom. So it's mentally hard to hear stuff like that, especially when you executed the way that you wanted to. For example, in the Thali challenge, I knew I stuffed that up. And I was like, "How can I recover from that?" And I was just lucky that Victoire did more faults than I did. As you saw, I was getting ready for LCK.

So I'm now sure how much you have been paying attention to commentary throughout the season. But there have been people who have felt that your dishes are too technical and lack soul compared to your competition. There's even a Vulture piece that came out recently where the writers surmised that your success was signifying "the demise of Top Chef," where preparation was being rewarded over spontaneity. What is your reaction to this criticism?
I think there's a real misunderstanding between food having soul, and presentation and technique. I get it; there are a lot of restaurants that I've been to where there's been technique for it and the food's not been great. Or the food's been amazing, but there's not really technique for it. The real answer is you can have both, and it works. I can grab Nick Wallace's gumbo and use that as a sauce for a fish and present it in a different way. You can't judge a dish that doesn't have soul without actually tasting the dish. I think that is what I want to share.

I'm trying to tick every single box of what it is for the competition for me to survive. If you can tackle creativity, presentation, and also deliciousness, then you're going to make it through. If I go in and say, "Oh, I'm gonna do this Malaysian curry that's in a bowl on top of this rice," and then I put it next to Nick Wallace's gumbo or Sara's pot licker. They're all kind of the same looking: A stew, a gravy, a rice. And then if I taste it, I can't judge that because the gumbo, curry, and potlicker are all delicious. So how will you gonna stand out from the others? Well, you need to then put technique and creativity into it. And that's what being in a cooking competition is all about. And I don't think that it's a secret. There are so many cooking competitions out there. You can have the best-tasting cake on Great British Bake Off or something like that. But if it's crumbled up and didn't form into the shape that you needed to have it, are you really gonna win? You're not putting yourself in the best contention there.

I think that a lot of the comments between soul and creativity, that's a myth and a hoax. Like I said, I put taste above anything else, and then creativity and then presentation. If it doesn't taste good, it's not going to be on there. I feel like ever since Bryan Voltaggio had his finale and everyone said it "lacks soul" and stuff like that, I feel like there's a division between comfort food and what it looks like and what it should look like compared to something that looks too pretty.

Finally, I'd be remiss not to bring up the fact that World All-Stars served as the final season with Padma Lakshmi as host. You are a self-proclaimed superfan of the show before you were a cheftestant, and you crafted a lovely homage to her on social media when she announced she was leaving. Give me your reaction to the announcement and her legacy, considering how pivotal she's been to both your fandom and your success on the show.
I think I've just been extremely lucky and fortunate to be in that Padma era and to be able to close it out. She's going to be missed. And it's going to be some huge shoes to fill in for sure. It's very weird, because we only just found out at the same time that everyone else did. And to know what happens in the finale, and to know that was part of her last episode, it really, really makes that finale special. It took it to another level, because it's the last time Padma is going to be on it as we know. And I think everyone in the past seventeen years grew up with her. That's more than half my life I've known Padma on Top Chef. I'm extremely excited for her and what she's got in the future. But it's also she's gonna be terribly missed as well.

Next, read our pre-finale interview with Buddha, as well as fellow World All-Stars finalists Gabri Rodriguez and Sara Bradley.