🥔 Order Up! Catching Up with Ted Pappas: From Greek-American Home Cook to MasterChef Season 16
Ted’s back to tell us how he ended up representing Greece on Team Europe — and what’s coming Saturday for Father’s Day.
Small Bites:
Where to find Ted:
Instagram: @teds_everyday_eats
MasterChef: Global Gauntlet (Season 16) on FOX, Wednesdays 8/7c — streaming next-day on Hulu
Original April 2025 Order Up! interview: A Conversation with Ted Pappas, Great American Recipe contestant, dad, and home cook
🥔 One Potato is a reader-supported newsletter - Subscribe for weekly Order Up! interviews delivered to your inbox!
Father’s Day is this weekend, and we’re excited to be catching up with one of our favorite One Potato dad’s: Ted Pappas. A little over a year ago, we chatted with him about cooking saganaki at Bears tailgates, learning Greek food at his mother’s elbow, and packing his daughters’ lunches between architecture meetings. He had just wrapped a turn on PBS’s The Great American Recipe, and we learned a little about what it takes to step onto a national stage as a home cook; well, he’s done it again, and in an even bigger way.
Since we last talked, Ted went through one of the longest, most thorough audition processes in food television — and he came out the other side with a white apron on FOX’s MasterChef: Global Gauntlet, representing Greece on Team Europe. The show’s airing now on Wednesday nights, streaming next-day on Hulu.
Filming is complete. The show is on its June hiatus for the World Cup, which felt like the perfect window to ask Ted what the experience was like. We talked about how he got there (a five-month application process, a phone call out of the blue), how the show’s “Global Gauntlet” theme tied straight into his Greek-American heritage and Chicago upbringing, why he still calls himself an amateur, and how his daughters — now 14 and 16 — feel about being girl-dad to a guy on national TV. We also talked about what’s coming next: this Saturday, June 20, Ted is back as our guest writer with a Father’s Day bonus recipe, sharing a Greek-inspired burger he made in one of the early MasterChef grilling challenges. Stay tuned!
Welcome back, Ted. It’s been a year. Catch us up — how did MasterChef happen?
It’s been a really fun year. The short version is I’d actually applied for a previous season of MasterChef and didn’t get on. Then in the middle of last year, one of the producers reached out to me directly and said, “Hey Ted, we still have your application. Would you be interested in applying for the upcoming season?” That ended up being Season 16, Global Gauntlet — though at the time, I had no idea what the theme was going to be.
From there it was about five months of phone calls, Zoom interviews, sharing photos and videos of family and friends, lifestyle videos, food I cook, stories about my heritage and culture. After all of that, they offered me one of the spots in production.
Once you’re in, you have about a month to get your life in order — wardrobe, work, family logistics — and you start preparing recipes and dishes you might want to present to the judges. You don’t know yet exactly what you’re going to cook, but you go in with ideas.
When did you actually find out the theme?
Not until we were on set, filming. They don’t tell you ahead of time. You pick up little hints from what they ask about — your family, your history, the stories behind your food — but the theme itself isn’t announced until you’re there.
When they did announce it, my mind started racing. Global Gauntlet — an international competition timed to the World Cup coming to the Americas. First-generation Greek on my dad’s side. Third on my mom’s. A grandfather who ran restaurants in Chicagoland in the 50s and 60s and a family restaurant in the 70s. The whole Greek-diner-in-America story that so many people grew up with. And of course, Chicago itself, which is a huge part of who I am as a home cook.
It was a lot to take in. But it was also a real gift. The theme let me bring all of those layers into the kitchen with me.
Walk us through the format. What does Global Gauntlet actually look like?
The show is divided into four regional teams: Americas, Africa, Asia Pacific, and Europe. Five home cooks on each team, twenty home cooks total competing for the title of MasterChef and a quarter-million-dollar prize.
The premiere on April 15 was the Europe audition episode, which is when I got my white apron. To get the apron, you cook your audition dish, present it to Chef Gordon, Chef Tiffany, and Joe — and you need three “yeses”. That’s the gate. Once the auditions for all four regions are done, the team competition begins. Each week, somebody puts their apron down and goes home. That’s the basic structure, but there are always surprises in the MasterChef kitchen. You don’t ever fully know what’s coming.
You first applied for MasterChef and didn’t get cast. You’ve cooked on The Great American Recipe. You have a following on Instagram. And yet you still call yourself a home cook. Is that a deliberate choice?
It’s important to me, yeah. I joke with my friends that I want to retain my amateur status, like in the old Olympics. You don’t want to go professional. You want to keep that home-cook identity, because that’s where the cooking actually comes from for me.
The thing about home cooks is, we’re where we are because of family, history, and culture — not because we went to culinary school and worked in a professional kitchen. Our craft was honed at the table, by the people who fed us. On MasterChef, we get to take those dishes and present them to chefs who have tasted everything in the world. That’s a wild feeling. Being one of the twenty who get the white apron, after everyone who applies, I don’t take that lightly.
How do you prepare for something you can’t predict?
You can’t, fully. You try to study the show’s history: what kinds of challenges have come up before, what skills they tend to test, and you build a little mental playbook. But the truth is, you cannot plan for what actually happens in that kitchen. What you can do is prepare yourself to pivot, to adjust, to think clearly when things go sideways.
The challenges are challenges for a reason. The pressure you see on the show is real, and it’s probably magnified about ten times in real life. The cameras catch a lot, but they don’t catch all of it.
We talked last year about your daughters being big fans of having you around for lunches and Greek dinners. They were 13 and 15 then. How did they feel about you going off to film this one?
They’re a little older now, which made everything easier, practically and emotionally. My oldest has her driver’s license, so I didn’t have to worry about the school-pickup logistics in the same way I did when I was on The Great American Recipe.
But what’s really fun is they get a kick out of it. They help me with my Instagram posts. Earlier this year I did a post tied to the Met Gala — we have this old water tower in our town that has steps going up to it, and a friend came along to take pictures of me up there wearing the white apron Chef Gordon signed for me. I showed my oldest the shots and she said, “No, don’t post that one. Do this one instead.” She was right. They’re a real part of all of this now, in a way they couldn’t be when they were little.
And they get to eat very well around here, which doesn’t hurt.
Are they cooking with you, or are they happy to let you have the kitchen?
They know I’m Type A in the kitchen. When I’m cooking something specific, especially something I care about, it’s all me. They’ve learned to read that.
But where they actually take the lead is baking. I’m not a baker — that’s not my wheelhouse. So when there’s a baking project, I step back and let them run it. They get to do more, they’re more part of it, and I get to be the assistant for once. That’s some of my favorite time with them. It’s a different dynamic when you’re not the one driving.
In a girl-dad world, the kitchen is one of the places we get to spend real time together, and I’m grateful for it.
What do you hope readers take from watching you on the show?
Probably the same thing I’d want anyone to take from a home cook stepping into a professional space: that you don’t need a culinary degree to make food that matters. Skill matters, but so does the story. Where you come from, who you cook for, what’s on the table at your family’s house — that shows up in the food, whether you mean it to or not. The judges can taste it. So can the people at home.
The dishes I made on the show are rooted in things my mother taught me, in the Greek diners my grandfather and our family ran in Chicago, in the way we eat at home now.
Where can people watch — and what’s coming next?
The show airs on FOX, Wednesdays at 8/7c with episodes streaming the next day on Hulu. Right now we’re on a hiatus while FOX runs World Cup coverage, so it’s actually a perfect window to go back and catch up on the audition episodes and the start of the team rounds. The new episodes pick back up on Wednesday, July 15th.
And this Saturday, June 20, I’m coming back to One Potato as a guest writer with a Father’s Day bonus recipe — a Greek-inspired burger I made for one of the early grilling challenges on the show. It ties into an episode you can stream right now while you’re waiting for the season to come back. It’s a good cookout dish and it means something to me. I hope you’ll make it.
Catch Ted on MasterChef: Global Gauntlet, Wednesdays on FOX, streaming next-day on Hulu. Follow him on Instagram @teds_everyday_eats, and check back this Saturday, June 20, for his Father’s Day bonus recipe.