There are 11 contestants still vying for victory in the 23rd season of Bravo’s reality show Top Chef, and two of them hail from right here in Leelanau County.

If you’ve tuned into Top Chef: Carolinas over the past month, you might have noticed a pair of familiar faces: Jennifer Lee Jackson and Justin Tootla, most recently part of the culinary team at Gilchrist Farm Winery in Suttons Bay. Though the pair cut their teeth cooking in New York and Detroit, they now consider Leelanau their “home base.”

“I grew up in Metro Detroit, but northern Michigan was always part of my childhood,” Tootla tells The Ticker. “I spent a lot of time while I was growing up visiting Charlevoix, Traverse City, Beulah, you name it, and spent summers cooking all throughout the Traverse City area.”

Jackson was born and raised in Georgia, but developed an affinity for northern Michigan through her relationship with Tootla. The two met in the late 2000s as students of the Culinary Institute of America, an institution billed as “the world’s premier culinary college.”

“After culinary school, Jennifer was on her way to Alaska, and she took a layover in Detroit, so I picked her up and drove her up to my family’s old cabin in Beulah,” Tootla says. “That was the first time she saw the Great Lakes, and she really just fell in love with the place.”

Tootla and Jackson have retained their ties to the region ever since, even when their culinary exploits have taken them elsewhere.

“We worked at Mission Table many years ago, and we did a pop-up circuit with the Little Fleet back when we had our restaurants in Detroit,” Tootla continues. Those restaurants, Voyager in Ferndale and Bunny Bunny in Detroit’s Eastern Market neighborhood, garnered acclaim from publications like Food & Wine, Esquire, Eater, and Thrillist. But the latter, which opened its doors in 2020, struggled due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and closed permanently in June 2024.

“Around that time, someone reached out from Gilchrist Farm; they just needed help and some leadership in the kitchen,” Tootla says. The two chefs jumped at the opportunity and set a course for Suttons Bay. “It was supposed to be just summer contract work, but I think we ended up staying for almost two years.”

When the Gilchrist gig wrapped up last year, Tootla and Jackson took the opportunity to pursue a dream they’d been thinking about for years: competing on Top Chef, the competitive culinary reality show that celebrated its 20-year anniversary last month.

“When we ran Voyager, [Top Chef] had reached out and asked us if we both wanted to start the process of getting on the show,” Jackson says. While the duo were in those early talks, though, Voyager landed “best new restaurant” honors from Esquire and a shout-out on Food & Wine’s 2018 “restaurants of the year” list. Suddenly the toast of the town, Jackson and Tootla “made the decision that it wasn't best for our restaurant or our staff if we left during that time.”

Top Chef came calling again last spring, and this time, Jackson and Tootla were ready. Their season, which is four episodes into its 14-episode run, was filmed last fall – though contestants are sworn to secrecy about how everything shakes out. Jackson and Tootla have so far survived four chef eliminations, with the next episode set to air Monday on Bravo. (The show is also available on the Peacock streaming service.)

While they were technically competitors on the show, Jackson and Tootla say they never stopped being one another’s biggest cheerleaders. Asked for their favorite Top Chef memory, both point to the same moment: Jennifer’s victory in the first episode’s so-called “Quickfire challenge," which had chefs prepare a meal on the sidelines of Charlotte Motor Speedway in the time it took a professional driver to complete 23 laps around the track. Jennifer’s team won the $15,000 prize – as well as a chance to climb into a race car and take a lap around the speedway at 175 miles per hour.

“I really enjoyed watching Jen win,” Tootla says.

Now in the midst of a consulting a job in Miami, Tootla says Top Chef fans are starting to recognize him in public.

Despite the newfound fame, the pair are already plotting their return to Michigan. Jackson will spend the first part of the summer cooking at Camp Tanuga, the Kalkaska summer camp Tootla attended when he was young. The duo are also signed on for the annual summer solstice celebration at Parcel, a Maple City Airbnb and event venue. Their later summer plans will take them away from the area – “We’ll be cooking on an island on the Wisconsin side of Lake Michigan,” Tootla says – but their dream is to find a permanent culinary project in Leelanau County.

As for Top Chef, Tootla and Jackson say they are more than happy to accept well wishes from fans as the season rolls along – even though, for them, the competition has already drawn to a close.

“We still need the luck,” Tootla laughs.