It’s a Thursday morning, and Jake Gandolfo is red-eyed and hung over.
“Big night last night,” he explained.
The 39-year-old Felton resident and former construction worker is one of the amateur chefs competing on Fox’s new reality cooking show, “MasterChef,” with celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay.
With his tribal tattoos and cowboy hat, Gandolfo is billed as the show’s loose cannon — a rock star of sorts in a chef’s coat.
It’s not hard to see why.
Gandolfo, a beefy guy who curses unabashedly, strolled into Felton’s Mountain Roasting Coffee Shop good-naturedly complaining of a hangover after a cooking gig in Walnut Creek the night before.
Of the 50 contestants who started the show, Gandolfo is one of 11 who remain.
The winner gets $250,000 and a cookbook deal. On Wednesday, Sept. 15, viewers will get to see whether Gandolfo takes home the title.
Gandolfo, of course, already knows the outcome, but he is keeping his mouth firmly shut.
“Why would I tell?” Gandolfo said. “It’s funny, that’s the first question I get from everybody. But I haven’t told anybody. Not my mom, not my wife.”
Gandolfo tunes in every week to watch the show, which he said is surreal.
“Watching myself on the show is a trip,” he said. “I see it for the first time every week like everyone else, and for whatever reason, I seem to come across OK in the living room. It’s wild.”
Gandolfo said he was picking up a pan from Sur La Table in Los Gatos when he noticed a flier calling for amateur chefs for the show. He took one and let the idea marinate for a bit.
“I drove to Los Angeles a few days later,” he said.
He quit his job running heavy equipment just before he headed to L.A. to tape the show in April.
“You’re in a position where you’re judged every day cooking, and what do we all shy away from? Being judged,” he said.
Gandolfo, who has a strong background in butchery, has repeatedly impressed the judges on the show with his culinary flair. His egg dish was deemed perfect. He placed in the top three in the pork chop “mystery box” challenge, and he was among the three finalists in the cupcake challenge. Then, he beat out all the other contestants on the Cat Cora challenge, in which the contestants tried to copy the Iron Chef’s truffled halibut.
“I think it’s because they did not expect much, coming from a guy who looks like me,” he said. “I’m all over the place with my cooking — I don’t put myself in a box.”
Since the series started airing in July, he’s been on a self-promotion mission, hosting cooking demonstration parties at the Crow’s Nest and Clouds in Santa Cruz, in Napa Valley and in Walnut Creek.
This past weekend, he won Best Tri Tip and Overall Grand Champion for the first annual Santa Cruz Rib Cook-Off in San Lorenzo Park.
Gandolfo also has started a catering and private chef business, Custom Culinary Concepts.
“I don’t think I want to open a restaurant — I like the idea of rogue chef-ing better,” he said. “I love to travel and I love to cook, and if I could just get the two in bed together, I’m good. It’d be a great life.”
In Connecticut, where Gandolfo grew up before moving to Santa Cruz in 1993, he said his family lived a very “hunter-gatherer” lifestyle. Gandolfo moved to Felton about 10 years ago with his wife and 20-year-old son, who graduated from San Lorenzo Valley High School.
“He’s thrilled about it all,” Gandolfo said. ”He travels with me, and we get the VIP treatment. It’s great.”
Gandolfo, who has no formal culinary training, said he’s always wanted to be chef because it has always come naturally to him. He said he reads books on cooking cover to cover, and the subject fascinates him.
“I’ve been making something for somebody since I was 5 years old,” Gandolfo said. “I’ve never really had the (courage) to become a chef until recent history, so I’m sort of reestablishing, redefining, recreating myself. With the show, all of a sudden, it all just made sense.”
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At a glance
WHAT: Jake Gandolfo’s Custom Culinary Creations
WHERE: www.scculinary.com
At a glance
WHAT: “MasterChef”
WHEN: 8 p.m. Wednesdays
WHERE: Fox TV
EXTRAS: To view past episodes and see interviews with Jake Gandolfo, visit www.fox.com/masterchef.
