Portland Magazine
March 1, 2022
Danie Baker '11 and Brett Bankson '15 never saw cooking—or television—in the cards for their careers. But then Top Chef Amateurs came calling.
Story by Danielle Centoni
Portraits by Amber Fouts
TWO UNIVERSITY OF PORTLAND ALUMS—strangers who never met—recently found their lives intersecting in a way no one would have ever predicted. One is a tax accountant named Danie Baker ’11 who majored in finance and accounting and now has a thriving career at Price Waterhouse-Cooper in Seattle. The other is Brett Bankson ’15, who arrived at UP just as Baker was leaving, majored in psychology and French, and then moved on to research in DC and grad school in Pittsburgh to pursue a PhD. The two clearly orbited completely different worlds—until this summer when they both found themselves in a place only a rarefied few ever get to venture: the set of a reality TV cooking show.
Turns out, Baker and Bankson do have something in common besides a UP degree (well, that and the fact that they both now live in the Seattle area). Their biggest connection? They both really, really love to cook. A lot. And they each followed their passion for cooking right into a coveted spot on Bravo’s Top Chef Amateurs this summer.
The show is similar to the original format of Top Chef, in which professional chefs compete against each other in a series of cooking challenges until by the end of the season only one remains. But on Amateurs, each episode is a one-off, with two home cooks competing against each other for the $5,000 prize and bragging rights.
Although they didn’t appear in the same episode (Baker’s episode aired in July while Bankson’s aired in September), they both say it was one of the most challenging, rewarding, and life-changing experiences they’ve ever had. And both can trace their journey to the competition kitchen all the way back to their days at UP. Sometimes a liberal arts education can prepare you for things you never in a million years expected. We caught up with them to find out how it all began and where they plan to go from here.
DANIE BAKER '11 QUEEN OF THE SCREEN
Although Danie Baker went all-in on left-brain subjects during her years at UP (she minored in math too), she never let her right brain starve, or her friends for that matter. “Even in college I’d bake birthday cakes from scratch and throw dinner parties at my house,” she says. “Cooking is stress relief for me, and good food is everything to me. My whole family is a bunch of cooks, so it’s just something I’ve always been into.”
Baker says she’s always enjoyed experimenting in the kitchen but only recently decided to get serious about turning her love of cooking into a media platform. She launched a food blog called Hey Danie Bakes and amped up her Instagram account with a steady stream of her professional-level food photography. “It was quarantine when I started the blog. People wanted entertainment. And it has really launched this new part of my cooking life.”
Just two weeks after unveiling her blog, casting for Top Chef Amateurs found her and reached out. After several rounds of interviews and auditions, they flew her to Portland in fall of 2020 to tape her episode in the same giant commercial-kitchen-turned-TV-set that had just been used for Top Chef Portland (everyone had to quarantine before filming and stay in the Top Chef bubble for the three-day shoot).
Cooking on a soundstage in front of a camera crew is hard enough but add in a one-hour time limit and a judging panel of famous chefs watching, and it was all more than a little intimidating. “I just cook for fun in my kitchen and sometimes bring Instagram along for the ride,” says Baker. “I don’t make gastronomical things with smokes and fogs and mousses and stuff. I make rustic comfort food. It was very overwhelming. I’m thinking, ‘Am I really here? Is this real life? How did I get here?’ When we first walked into the kitchen, I didn’t know we were filming, that’s how nervous and out of my mind I was.”
Luckily the two contestants competing on each episode get paired with a professional chef with extensive Top Chef experience as their mentor. “This was the best part,” says Baker, “to cook with someone who’s so knowledgeable. Tiffany Derry was my paired Top Chef alumna, and she’s amazing, an incredibly talented chef who is so low-key and so supportive. She really helped me focus when I was freaking out about what I was going to make. I was 10 minutes in and I hadn’t started cooking! She’d say, ‘Follow your heart and your gut and your intuition.’”
It worked. Baker not only met the challenge of cooking a dish that showcased both sweet and bitter flavors, her sweet potato coconut soup (inspired by her family’s sweet potato pie) topped with grilled radicchio and arugula chimichurri stole the show. This summer, when she got the chance to watch the episode from the other side of the screen during a viewing party with friends and family, all of that stress and anxiety was a distant memory. “I knew what was going to happen, but the moment they announced that I was the Top Chef Amateurs champion of that episode, it was just the coolest thing to have all of my close friends and family there to experience it with me. I kept thinking, ‘I want to go back to that moment. Let’s do that again.’”
So, instead of being relieved the cameras are off, it seems Baker has developed a taste for the spotlight. She already incorporates short videos into her Instagram feed, but she recently launched a YouTube channel called The Dish! with several professionally shot and edited teasers and a full episode already posted. “While I was filming Top Chef Amateurs, none of this was going through my mind because I was so stressed,” she says. “But a few months after, as I was thinking about it more and more, I was like, that was a fun experience! I can be entertaining; I can make full-fledged episodes. Basically, I felt like you gotta take opportunities and seize them when you have them. Why not keep making content and creating?”
Does that mean she’s leaving her accounting career behind? Not so fast. “I love accounting. I took my very first accounting class at UP in the Pamplin School of Business, and I fell in love. I actually do really love my job. But I love food more,” she says. “Cooking is rooted into my person. It’s who I am and what I’ve grown up around. I can’t imagine not being in the kitchen. If a production company came to me, I’d say ‘Absolutely. Let’s make cooking videos.’”
BRETT BANKSON '15 STUDENT OF THE KITCHEN
Brett Bankson says he has UP to thank for his current preoccupation with food. It started with French class.
“My professor, Trudie Booth, told me if you declare a French major, you can study abroad with your financial aid.” Sold! Bankson declared a double major in psychology and French, hopped a plane, and underwent a culinary coming of age. “Being in France for six months, I’m still unpacking that,” he says. “Every evening with my host family we’d eat for several hours. We’d have soup, we’d have salad, we’d have a cheese course.”
After he graduated, he moved to Washington, DC, for a research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health. “My passion for research and academia started at UP. I had a great time doing research as an undergrad, and I thought, I’ll just keep on doing this. I love doing it and the people I’m surrounded with.” However, while there, those memories of exquisite meals in France took root in the fertile ground of the city’s thriving culinary landscape and grew into a full-fledged obsession.
“DC is a great food city, and it really imprinted on me,” says Bankson. “That’s when I started cooking in earnest with a capital E. I was like, I can cook as many meals as I want for myself every day! I can cook for my lab, my friends, my friends of friends. I don’t need anyone’s permission. What if I spend all my hours cooking or going to restaurants and markets?”
But cooking remained just a hobby, a creative release, as Bankson continued on the research track, opting to pursue a PhD in visual neuroscience through University of Pittsburgh’s cognitive psychology program. “I had the opportunity to work with these patients in the epilepsy monitoring unit at Pitt. It’s fascinating work. There was no reason to say no.”
However, several years later, he now realizes that’s not the same as a reason to say yes. As the work became more difficult, he started questioning his path. “It started to feel like, ‘Why am I doing this?’” he says. He began devoting more of his time to cooking, opting to cater events, wedding receptions, and academic events rather than do his actual work. “It’s where my mind goes when I’m daydreaming, when I’m procrastinating, when I go to bed, when I get up.” And he’s had no shortage of encouragement. “None of my fellow grad students are going to say, ‘Oh I don’t want that ricotta hazelnut tart from you.’ I’ve had a captive audience for the past few years who affirm my own interest in cooking.”
So, when Bravo put out the casting call for auditions, Bankson didn’t hesitate for a second. Here was a cool food opportunity that would give him yet another excuse to tie on an apron. And when he finally made it to the Top Chef Amateurs kitchen in Portland, he whole-heartedly embraced every minute of it. “Seeing the Top Chef neon sign, it was like, oh wow. This is the thing I’ve been seeing on TV for years,” he says. “Paradoxically, the surreality of it all relieved the stress. It was like, This isn’t real. It’s a kitchen stage that’s enormous and gorgeous and has famous people on it. I don’t care about outcomes. I just don’t want my hands shaking, and I want to produce food I don’t have regrets about.”
Mission accomplished. Bankson was tasked with one of the most notorious of the Top Chef food challenges: the mise en place challenge. He and his competitor must select three ingredients out of a total of 10 options available on a first-come, first-served basis. They each have one hour to prep those ingredients and create a dish incorporating them. Once an item comes off the table, there’s no going back. With a little help from his pro chef mentor Stephanie Cmar, he knocked it out of the park with celery velouté (soup) with roasted oranges and brown butter walnut gremolata.
Aside from winning, the best part, says Bankson, was getting to spend time with real-deal food professionals at the apex of their careers. “It was a phenomenal experience. Meeting the judges who are Top Chef alums, meeting Gail Simmons. They’re real people who are talented and have a ton of passion. They’re very engaged in their profession.”
If anything, the experience has crystallized his resolve to pivot into a career in food. “It was an unexpected opportunity I’m happy to leverage and ride out into the work of catering and private cheffing, which is where my hopes are now,” he says. “I’m in the process of leaving my grad program to pursue food professionally. I love to cook for people, people are happy to pay me to cook for them. I’m still trying to sort it out, but I’m thinking maybe this is something I can actually do.”
DANIELLE CENTONI works in UP’s marketing and communications department and is a longtime freelance food journalist and cookbook author.
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