Tucson chef Maria Mazon makes it to top 5 but falls short in ‘Top Chef’ quest

Restaurant Wars is the most coveted of the “Top Chef” challenges, Mazon said.

“To take the W in Restaurant Wars, I can leave next,” she recounted of the episode that aired May 22.

“Top Chef Portland” was the latest of Mazon’s national spotlight moments. Since 2017, she has been featured on the Travel Channel, Food Network and the Cooking Channel, and has been spotlighted in the New York Times, New York Magazine and USA Today.

But the 2020 James Beard Award-nominee called her “Top Chef” run “one of the best experiences of my life.”

“And I’m not just saying that because I was on TV,” said Mazon. “The fact that I got to experience something like that during a pandemic? And then I met beautiful, beautiful people. I laughed, I cried. Everything that 2020 needed, I got it all.”

Mazon, who is writing a cookbook that will draw from her recipes at the 11-year-old restaurant and new ones that explore her Sonoran culinary heritage, said “Top Chef Portland” showed “who I was as a chef and a human being.”

“I cook with my heart and I’m a crybaby, and I embrace that,” she said.

The show also taught her some valuable personal lessons, from reenforcing her confidence in her skills in the kitchen to showing her that she needs to “slow down and smell the roses” at work and at home with wife Lily, a Tucson firefighter, and her 12-year-old son, Rene.