Reunited with Macomb's skateboard, budding TV chef Gabriella Baldwin

Testa Barra chef Gabriella Baldwin becomes a regular face on Food Network.

When she’s not cooking and running the Macomb Township Italian restaurant with her husband Mike Baldwin, Gabriella can be found parenting her preschool-aged son, skateboarding or competing against other chefs from around the country on various televised cooking competitions.

A graduate of the Culinary Institute of America in New York and a Level 1 sommelier, Baldwin’s skills, charisma and broadcasting experience make her a highly bookable candidate for these types of shows.

We caught up with her this week to learn more about her latest Food Network appearance, the new show “Last Bite Hotel” and what’s in store for Testa Barra this fall and winter. Her seventh national television appearance, “Last Bite Hotel,” is hosted by Emmy-nominated stage singer and actor Tituss Burgess and premieres Tuesday night.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q: I know you can’t tell us what the final outcome of the show will be, but what was your main takeaway from “Last Bite Hotel” as a contestant?

A: This is the crème de la crème of chefs, right? And we have 13 ingredients… and we have to use them for the whole trip. Choosing your 13 ingredients and not knowing what you’re being offered is a strange and different situation. This was my seventh time on the show and I’ve certainly never been on a show like this before.

And then you have to add Tituss’ theatricality. He was incredible to work with and you could really feel the energy in the room moving when Tituss started doing what he does best. But the mystery of it all and the limited ingredients, you really had to think about what was important to you. It was cool to see each chef’s ingredients once they were revealed because you saw the strategy, but then you saw the individuality.

There’s a level of strategy where you have to be a little bit general and vague because you don’t know what’s going to happen to you. But you also have to hold on to certain elements that make you who you are, and fighting for that kind of identity with your eyes blindfolded on the table was, I don’t know… it made you dig a little deeper.

Q: This isn’t your first appearance on Food Network; you’ve been on it before. How did you get involved with the network?

A: So in 2018, that was my first invitation. Oh my gosh, we had a voicemail at the time that we never listened to. I’m sure 90% of the restaurants out there don’t listen to their voicemails. Our web girl reached out to me and said, “Oh my gosh, I just found this email in spam. It’s Food Network and they want to talk to you.” I was like, “Oh (shit). Thank goodness they picked up on that.” They said we were trying to reach out to you, we’d seen you in local publications in Detroit magazines and on the local news and we thought you’d be a great fit.”

So I went on Triple G (Guy Fieri’s “Guy’s Grocery Games”) in 2018. I actually won right out of the gate, so that was fun. It really made me realize what my original dream was. Before culinary school, I actually went to mass communications school. I wanted to be a broadcast journalist. So I felt like I always wanted to be on television. I never knew I was going to come back to it after I turned my life around and went back to something that I’ve done my whole life just for myself, which is cooking. So the fact that I’m able to merge the two now is that I’m really living my dream in addition to our restaurant, Testa Barra, and everything else.

More: Two Detroit-area chefs will compete on Food Network shows this month

Q: How do you stay calm during these shows, not only because of the task at hand, but also because of the host yelling, the lights, the cameras? What advice would you give to other chefs who might find themselves in these unique situations?

A: Yeah, if someone says they’re 100 percent calm and they’re just like a cool cucumber, I don’t believe them. I think part of it is fear, but being on edge leads to really good results in these kinds of situations. I try to remind myself that I’m here for a reason, that they asked me to be here for a reason, and I’ve been cooking for a long time. I do it every day, so I have just as much right to be there on that stage and on that podium as the guy next to me. And at this age, and with what I’m doing, I keep thinking, Why not me? Right? Why can’t I be next? I just have to keep working hard.

Q: You work hard. You run your family restaurant Testa Barra, which you run with your husband, Mike. It seems like there’s always something seasonal going on there. Your California-inspired space within Testa Barra, called Oro, closed. How did that happen?

A: Oro means gold, so golden tequila and golden masa for the tortillas, like to really bring out that Latin fusion element. I’m Puerto Rican and I really wanted to bring to life a culmination of my family recipes, things that I grew up eating… our family has been visiting Baja Sur for about nine years now and I’ve been traveling back and forth to California for a while now with Food Network and I’ve discovered a love for this vibrant, fun, communal food. California, I think, should be its own planet. Forget the weather, right? The food is so fun and vibrant, and it’s got a lot of texture and light, but at the same time it brings organic and natural flavors and local sustainability. So that’s what we tried to capture with Oro. We’ve gotten rave reviews on the guacamole and we’ve had several people reach out to us with the recipe.

Q: And the Christmas-themed Dasher Room is coming back? What do you want people to know about that?

A: As for the Dasher Room, it’s definitely cocktail-focused. We have our own cocktail menu for the Dasher Room, in addition to Testa’s, but you can get both. The core menu remains the same, and I really wanted to focus and hone in on our favorites… I really want to add a spicy element of really fun specials. We always have specials going on, but they’ll be really seasonal.

Q: How locally does Testa Barra source your menu and what suppliers do you suggest?

A: Our salesman Del Bene, my sales rep, knows how to get me the local products that are coming into the area from Michigan right now. Some of them are Raven Oaks, we work a lot with Gass Centennial, a family farm, and a few others. I talk to my salesmen all the time. Matt from Motor City Seafood… I wonder how the fish are doing in the lake. Last year I did a whole trout (special) that was caught 20 hours before from a local Michigan stream. That’s important to a chef. They say a bartender’s best friend is a chef’s palate. Well, a chef’s best friend is their salesmen. Their salesmen’s eyes on what’s hot, who’s producing the best (product), and how we can use it.

Q: How does being a sommelier help you as a chef? It’s not an easy certification to obtain and you earned it in addition to your culinary studies.

A: I have never been a good test taker. I excelled in the physical part of my culinary training and had to work hard academically. It is just hard for me to connect the dots between mind, mouth and paper. It was a personal challenge for me to pass this test.

I also have a passion for wine. I think it’s a great palate trainer. A chef has to work to keep his palate sharp, and it’s not just in the mouth, it’s in the mind. Is it acidic or spicy? You have to create a scenario where you don’t close your mind to one way of describing something. Maybe you look at it through a different word, through a different window. I like wine to challenge me and keep me alert. In that respect, again, it was a personal challenge for me to pass this test. When you talk about terroir, which is the taste of a place, there’s nothing better to represent a place than its wine.

Q: Speaking of physique, you are a skateboarder. Have you skated a lot and who are your skateboarding heroes?

A: I’m actually recovering from a broken metatarsal from skateboarding, so I’m taking a little break right now. I’m in physical therapy, trying to get back on track. But we actually have a mini ramp, our whole garage is a mini ramp, so we skate mostly at home. I broke my foot at Modern Skate and Surf, we go there too. We take my son there, he skateboards now too.

As far as female skateboarding heroes, I love Leticia Bufoni. She did amazing things for women in skateboarding and really raised the bar for how they were paid. And kind of like the celebrity around female skateboarders, she was the first one to really do it. Patti McGee was the first one to do it. I don’t know if you remember the famous handstand on the cover of Life magazine. I met her and she’s a doll. She inspires me because she was going against the grain and she was just like, oh, that’s okay, that’s what I do. She didn’t think about it at all. That was really who she was.

Tony Hawk, I’ve met him a couple of times and I think he’s amazing. I mean, he’s the godfather, right? And his son Riley, I skated with them and the U.S. team. They had a Go Skate day in Chicago, and my friend Amy and I were two of four women out of thousands of skaters. I thought, one day I want to figure out how to break that barrier, you know? And I’m not there yet, but it was just weird to me, you know, thousands of skaters and I was like, there’s a lot of amazing women skaters, I skated with them.

Q: One last question before we get back to your restaurant days. You’re originally from New York, how did you end up cooking in the metropolis of Detroit?

A: Chefs always take their knives with them when they travel, and every time I visited my new boyfriend here in Michigan—we met at culinary school in New York—every time I visited them, I was working and they were enjoying my work. And I was really enjoying the company. I got a couple of job offers when I left the CIA[Culinary Institute of America]and I was like, “You know what? Let’s wait six months. I can revisit those job offers. I know I always know where my house is. We had an apartment in Manhattan, I mean, you just throw a rock and you’ll find a great restaurant, right?” So 10 years, a kid, and a restaurant later… I guess it was a good decision.

Melody Baetens is a food critic for The Detroit News.

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