Christina Xenos conquers the Chopping Block

In the Chopped kitchen, simple ingredients are rarely present. Each self-contained episode of the Food Network cooking competition includes three rounds—appetizer, entrée and dessert—with an accompanying mystery basket of required (and often bizarre) ingredients.

In an episode that aired this October, Los Angeles-based professional chef and cookbook author Christina Xenos, BSJ ’02, relied on her background to defy the odds and conquer the “Chopping Block.” Despite her success—including running Sweet Greek Personal Chef Services—personal cheffing wasn’t Xenos’ original plan. OHIO Today News spoke with Xenos about her nontraditional path to becoming a Chopped Champion.

What drew you to OHIO for your undergraduate studies?

I’ve always really been into writing and journalism. In high school, I was the editor of my school newspaper and the literary magazine. I really also enjoyed cooking, but my parents were first-generation Greek-Americans, and they said, “You have to go to college.” My brother was at OHIO, so we learned about Scripps. I applied, and I got into the magazine program.

Journalism is a huge love of mine. I really respect it. And my education I got at OHIO, it doesn't get any better than that. I loved it. I worked in the field for around 15 years before I started cooking professionally.

How did you transition from a journalist to a professional chef?

I went to Cincinnati after graduation and worked for a company called F+W Media doing fine art book publishing. I started working with artists and helping them break down their process; in hindsight, that really helped me with the step-by-step for cookbook publishing and how to break out recipes. 

I was there for three years, and then I moved out to Los Angeles and started working for Where magazine. It was an entertainment magazine that was basically the visitor guide to the city. I started our first consumer-facing website and wrote content for the website—covering restaurant openings, profiling chefs, things like that. That started to rekindle my love of cooking and excitement about fine dining.

I started culinary school at that time; I just took a professional track at night for 14 weeks. I learned about personal cheffing and wrote a business plan, and that’s how that transition happened.

How did the skills you learned at OHIO transfer into building your own business?

As a journalist, you are always coming up with your own story ideas, and you have to pitch them. It’s kind of the basis of being an entrepreneurial person—it makes you really proactive. You just go for what you know, go for the story, go for what you want to do. It’s a constant state of reevaluation. And after working at Where for 11 years, I was reevaluating. I was like, I can do this [professional cheffing].

I think coming out of Scripps and coming out of OHIO, you’re coming out of an incredible program. It’s important to always know you have the skills and be confident in the skills that you learned. 

What was the process of getting on Chopped like?

Being in LA—and I think because of my Instagram account—sometimes casting companies reach out to me to audition for different shows. I was on Food: Fact or Fiction as an expert. A couple of years ago I was on Frankie vs. the Internet, which is on the Tastemade network.

I had auditioned for a couple of other shows, but then they got me in the pool for Chopped and I auditioned. They sent me the audition tape in early 2023, and then I didn’t hear anything until the beginning of this year, when the producer called me and said, “We can’t tell you anything for sure, but you might want to start looking for airline tickets.” She told me they were doing an episode with all-Greek ingredients and all-Greek chefs. I was really excited, because I got to cook the food that I know.

How did you handle the pressures of time and ingredient restrictions?

Yeah, there’s no lying there. The clock is real. I had about three weeks [to prepare] going into it, and my husband trained me. He would go out and buy the weirdest stuff, like eel and random vegetables. And he would make boxes and run the clock, and I would have to do it. I basically brainstormed, which goes back to journalism because we are always making lists. I made a huge list of all of the possible ingredients and what I could do with them.

Because I’m so familiar with Greek food, a lot of what I did was second nature. It was just so second nature to stuff the leg of lamb [in the entrée round], because that's another recipe in our cookbook, and I make that all the time for pop-ups and client dinners and things like that. Nothing was easy, but coming up with what I was going to make wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. I felt really prepared going into it.

It seemed like in the dessert round, there was a moment where it looked like the win was slipping away. How did you overcome that?

They played up the drama of the cream cheese filling not setting, but that wasn’t actually the problem. The problem was that the sauce was really hot, so I knew I had to chill it and firm it up. Everything happened at once, and it was stressful. I didn’t know if the dessert was gonna work.

I think dessert was my hardest round, because most of the traditional Greek desserts take so long to make. Coming up with a dessert that you can make in 30 minutes was always going to be a challenge for me. But when I was prepping, I was coming up with some no-bake recipes. And when they gave us the mosaiko, oh, I was like, oh this is all perfect. I’m not going to try to make a cake from scratch in 30 minutes. I'm not going to even attempt using the ice cream maker—I’ve seen so many disasters with that.

What was going through your mind when you saw Chef Christos’ dessert on the Chopping Block?

It was all really unbelievable. From the moment I walked into that studio at 6:30 in the morning and I saw the guys, I was like, “Oh, I’m so screwed.” These guys were high-level restaurant chefs, I’m just this second career private chef. I think they really discounted me. I just thought they wrote me off from the start.

I knew Christos was a formidable chef; he is amazing. I saw his beautiful dessert and was like, I’m probably screwed. But in the dessert round they go through to your other dishes; they rate you based on everything, so I thought I had a chance. You don’t make it to the dessert round without really, really wanting to win. Because it is a very long day and once you make it that far, you’re like, “I didn’t come here for nothing.” I really wanted to win.

When I saw his dish on the chopping block, it was just unbelievable to me. I think I was in shock. It was a very surreal moment. I haven’t had many moments in my life where you work so hard for something and then it finally happens.

The Chopped Champion takes home a $10,000 cash prize. What do you plan to do with your winnings?

I want to open a cooking school in Greece. I’ve been working on a business plan since I’ve been here and brainstorming what this can be.

We’re looking at properties, nothing immediate yet. It takes a long time to realize something, but the step this year was realizing that we really want to be there. I narrowed down the area I want it to be, looking at properties and houses. I’m waiting for the right thing to come along, and hopefully we’ll move forward. 

Featured and story photos courtesy Christina Xenos.