Celebrity Chefs And The Fast Food Restaurants They Can't Get Enough Of

One of the most engaging and omnipresent food people of the 2020s, Justin Sutherland has opened restaurants like Handsome Hog, The Gnome, Woodfire Cantina, and Chickpea Hummus Bar while also being all over TV, winning "Iron Chef America," placing highly on Season 16 of "Top Chef," and hosting and cooking on TruTV's "Fast Foodies." The latter requires the chef to both re-create and elevate familiar, populist chain restaurant eateries for celebrity guests. Sutherland told Mashed that he thought he did particularly well on challenges revolving around Wendy's Spicy Chicken Sandwich and the Portillo's hot dog.

But when Sutherland wants to feed himself with something inexpensive that's both quickly and widely available, he likes to combine the signature offerings of two different fast food joints. "I like to get a Beef and Cheddar from Arby's, and then I like to go to KFC and get the gravy and put the Beef and Cheddar in the gravy from KFC," he said. "KFC, whatever they do with that gravy, I still can't figure it out."

Chef Kristen Kish exudes a duality with food not seen with most culinary personalities, who generally specialize in one kind of cuisine or approach so as to carve out a niche for themselves and demonstrate their expertise. But Kish is good at a lot of things, and she enjoys many different types of food, both fancy and not so fancy. For example, Kish won Season 10 of "Top Chef," opened Arlo Grey (one of Austin's most acclaimed restaurants), and published "Kristen Kish Cooking: Recipes and Techniques." But she also hosts "Fast Foodies" on TruTV, where, alongside chefs Justin Sutherland and Jeremy Ford, she re-creates, celebrates, and puts new spins on widely loved fast food items.

Kish loves some fast food herself. She's a self-proclaimed Arby's aficionado, but not for the chain's signature roast beef sandwiches. "My favorite fast food always is Arby's," Kish told Mashed in 2021. "Chicken fingers and curly fries are by far the greatest fast food I think is out there." She doesn't dislike Arby's beef; it's just that she loves chicken fingers that much. "No matter what fast food place I go to, I always gravitate towards the fried chicken of some kind."

Some might say Paul Hollywood isn't a chef because he doesn't cook savory entrees in a professional kitchen. But he's ascended to the absolute top of the world of baking, creating desserts and bready treats for major and fancy hotels throughout Europe (per The Daily Mail) before publishing the bestselling cookbook "100 Great Breads," hosting the series "Use Your Loaf," and positioning himself as an expert (and global celebrity) as a judge for more than decade on "The Great British Bake Off."

Because his professional life revolves almost entirely around sweets — devising them, baking them, eating them, judging them — he'll occasionally get a hankering for something from the other end of the taste spectrum. "I crave salt," he told Radio Times (via What to Watch) in 2012. After filming the Christmas special of "The Great British Bake Off," he and fellow judge Mary Berry stopped off at a McDonald's drive-thru to satiate his urge. "I'd been eating cakes all day and had a big craving." His go-to order: McDonald's signature pairing of a Big Mac and a large portion of its popular french fries.

Fans of food television have borne witness to the many different sides of chef and restaurateur Richard Blais' personality. A "Top Chef" finalist who won the series' first "All-Stars" season, Blais took himself and his cooking very seriously, incorporating innovative and progressive molecular gastronomy techniques. He's also published a book on home cooking and hosted several humorous, lighthearted cooking competition shows for Food Network. But long before he opened edgy, high-end restaurants like Trail Blais and The Spence, the chef got his start in fast food: He got his first cooking job in a McDonald's kitchen. "And the first batch of Filet-O-Fish sandwiches that I served when I was 14, I forgot to put the top buns on them," Blaise told Mashed in 2022. "So I was being avant garde well before I knew that that was my actual calling in the kitchen."

Golden Arches notwithstanding, Blais cited a Mexican-inspired eatery and a Florida-based chicken chain as his fast food preferences. "I'm a big fan of Chipotle from every which way," Blais said. "We eat a lot of Chipotle in my house." The other: "I don't know if you've ever had Pollo Tropical, but it's Caribbean inspired grilled chicken, and plantains, and beans and rice, and I could eat it every single day."

Chef and restaurateur Andrew Zimmern has made a career out of hitting the road to see what foods might taste good, particularly those perceived to be odd or exotic. He's tasted all kinds of new things on shows like "Bizarre Foods," "Driven by Food," "Bizarre Worlds," and "The Zimmern List," but when he's out on the highways of the world and gets hungry between taping episodes, he seeks out an outlet of Culver's, a moderately sized fast food chain that specializes in three comforting, familiar, regional specialties — frozen custard, their signature ButterBurgers, and cheese curds. Frozen custard is an airier version of ice cream because it's whipped and is made with egg yolks, according to Southern Living; ButterBurgers are hamburgers with the top buns garnished with melted butter, and cheese curds are breaded and deep-fried balls of cheese.

"I have a weakness in my heart for Culver's. It's a family favorite," Zimmern told The Daily Meal. "It's a mid-Western chain that does custard really well and does hamburgers pretty decently." Zimmern's favorite combination at Culver's: a Double ButterBurger and a Vanilla Concrete frozen custard.

Before she became one of Food Network's most famous and influential personalities, cooking elaborate and often very expensive food from her coastal northeastern mansion, Ina Garten, the "Barefoot Contessa" herself, ran a Hamptons gourmet grocery store also called "Barefoot Contessa." Garten's tastes and expertise levels lean toward the fresh, festive, and decidedly highbrow — in other words, not fast food.

Garten admitted to NBC's "Today" in 2017 that she rarely, if ever, partakes in any of the drive-thru-obtained, paper-wrapped, quickly prepared, and inexpensively sold fast food that helps define the modern American diet. "I have to say, I don't eat fast food at all, with one exception," Garten said. She writes a lot of cookbooks and embarks on national publicity tours to promote them, and those travels take her to the West Coast, home of many locations of a particular burger chain. "When we're in California doing book tours, we always have to go to In-N-Out Burger. It's so good and I know it was Julia Child's favorite too, so it's okay."

Over decades of his professional life, Alton Brown has pursued about every possible angle there is with regards to food. In order to get the training, experience, and knowledge to make his food TV shows viable, Brown trained at a culinary school and worked in professional kitchens. "I never worked higher than a lead cook. I could have moved to sous chef positions, but I didn't want to tell people I was going to stay that long," he told The AV Club. From there, it was on to Food Network, where he hosted more than 250 episodes of Food Network's "Good Eats," a scripted, comic cooking instructional show that investigated the scientific hows and whys of food. He's since hosted multiple versions of "Iron Chef" and "Cutthroat Kitchen," among other projects, meaning Brown has a pretty deep knowledge about food, and his opinions about things like fast food can be taken seriously.

According to Brown, the fast food burgers that get him more excited than any other are the ones from In-N-Out. "The hamburger is definitive, greasy but oddly clean-tasting at the same time and the sauce is actually 'special,'" he told Esquire. "And the shake tastes the way shakes tasted back when I was a kid."