Inside the Kitchen: Seven Questions With Monteverde's Sarah Grueneberg

There's a few, but stuffed cabbage is one of them. My grandmother's stuffed cabbage and tasting that. The first episode I won on Top Chef was the Patti LaBelle Challenge, where I took my grandmother's stuffed cabbage and made it for them. I added sausage and all these things to it. I won the challenge and that was my aha moment of, "I don't need to be scared of who I am and my history and my rural upbringing and background."

Fine dining to me is a careful, critical eye approach to telling a story of cooking. So it's a mix of how you feel when you walk into the service, to the hospitality, to the food.

I struggle with this on a regular basis because at some point if we're going to do a lot more, now's the time. And then part of me just really wants to be happy with successful businesses and I don't need 20 of them to make me successful. So the conundrum is like, how far do you grow? What do you do? A lot of chefs I think open much faster than we did. I kind of was hoping that we were going to open the second restaurant this year. But the goal I think now is to open a few more spots that still hold the root. I don't want to do something where I lose the essence of why. I want to open more businesses to help our team grow and ultimately to give Bailey [Sullivan, executive chef at Monteverde] the opportunity to have real equity and ownership in a restaurant of her own.

I still have not been to I Sodi in New York! I really want to go to Zahav in Philly. And I love Mike [Solomonov]. The Grey in Savannah. Mashama [Bailey] and I have become great friends recently, and I really want to go to her restaurant L'Arrêt in Paris.

To cook with your heart. And I always tell people: Follow your food. To me that means knowing who made it, why they made it, who grew it. I'm a big history nerd, so I love the concept of the maps and traditional dishes. And so it's really to follow your food, meaning dig in and learn more about the people behind the scenes that make these dishes possible.

Pasta, but I like cheese and crackers also. I love good cheese. And I love dried pasta. I love fresh pasta. A truly al dente pasta — carbonara, pomodoro, linguine clams — and I'm a happy person.