It’s 2:00 p.m. on a New York Friday when Buddha Lo logs onto our scheduled Zoom call, clad in a white t-shirt and a matching smile. Outside, Manhattan’s skies are gloomy and gray, but here, Lo’s excitement is as radiant as the summer sun.
“Today’s quite a cool, good, nice day,” he tells me, a thick Australian accent breaking through his cheeky grin. “I’m not sure if you can notice from the background, but I just signed a new lease for a restaurant downtown in Tribeca, and I’m sitting in it right now.”
Behind him, the space is empty — a calm contrast to the dizziness of his past year. In just seven months, Lo’s grown from a swanky Upper East Side restauranteur to the world’s first-ever two-time champion of Bravo’s “Top Chef” — winning consecutive seasons of the beloved cooking contest against competitors from around the U.S. and the world.
Between his “World All Stars” victory and his latest restaurant venture, Lo sat down with Character Media to discuss menus, momentum and crafting the “best meal of your life” (twice).
CM: Firstly, I want to say congratulations on your back-to-back “Top Chef” victories. Not only have you proven your talent on a national scale, but you’ve now been crowned an international all-star, which must be a cool feeling.
BL: Yeah, it’s an incredible feeling. I’m still soaking it in. But in the moment, I wasn’t really thinking about international or domestic; I just always go into competitions just nonstop thinking about winning. I always say to myself, “You’ve got to win this, you’ve got to win this, you’re going to win this.” And I’ve lost many competitions with this mentality, but it’s just all about making sure that you go in with a can-do attitude. And this time, it worked out. It’s been such an amazing time, and it’s just unbelievable to think that I did that.
CM: I want to talk a little bit about the…
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