How Carla Hall Went from Theater Kid to Top Chef
Your Mama’s Kitchen
Higher Ground
4.6 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2025
⏱️ 55 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Top Chef star and renowned cooking show judge Carla Hall takes us back to the Sunday Suppers she grew up going to at her grandmother's house outside of Nashville, Tennessee. Carla details the unconventional road she took to becoming a chef, including being a theater kid and modeling in Paris. She also opens up about learning of her grandmother's dementia through the way she made her mac & cheese. Plus, we learn how to make her family's extra special pound cake.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Your Mama's Kitchen is brought to you by Rivian. |
| 0:09.1 | Mama, what, what's wrong with Granny's Mac and Cheese? |
| 0:12.7 | She's like, nothing's wrong with it. |
| 0:13.9 | I'm like, are you serious? |
| 0:15.0 | This is not Granny's Mac and Cheese. |
| 0:17.3 | And I think I was the first person who I was like, now I'm interviewing people. Now I'm |
| 0:22.9 | saying, okay, do you remember what Granny's Mac and Cheese was like? Do you remember it's having |
| 0:28.1 | the cheese sauce and sticking together and the cheese on top and it was a lot of brown and crusty |
| 0:33.2 | around the edges? This ain't that. This is not right. |
| 0:38.4 | What's wrong with Granny? |
| 0:40.5 | And so you were the one who paid attention. |
| 0:42.6 | That was your first clue. |
| 0:44.0 | Mm-hmm. |
| 0:52.2 | Hello, hello. |
| 0:53.2 | Welcome back to your mama's kitchen. This is a place where we explore how we are |
| 0:56.5 | shaped as adults by the kitchens that we grew up in as kids. And yes, I'm talking about the food, |
| 1:02.0 | but so much other stuff as well. The laughter, the rivalries, the music on the radio, the way |
| 1:07.4 | you'd snap your towel at your siblings when you were doing the dishes after |
| 1:11.2 | dinner. I'm Michelle Norris. And our guest today is Carla Hall. And I'm so excited about this. |
| 1:17.8 | She made a name for herself competing on two separate seasons of Top Chef and sharing all the time |
| 1:23.9 | her philosophy, her beautiful philosophy that cooking is really all about love. |
| 1:29.6 | She went on to host and judge on many other shows, including worst cooks in America and |
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