"I don't like doing anything that I'm going to fail at," Magbitang says. "Of course there's a part of you that thinks, 'Can I do this?'"
Top Chef wasn't even a show Magbitang was sure she wanted to do. The chef had turned down competition television before, never convinced she was wired for the format. Cooking and competing felt like two different things. One she loved. The other she could happily avoid.
"Top Chef has been around for so long," she says. "It's kind of its own thing at this point. You see people reaping the benefits of it. You see people who maybe didn't have the best experience. But I'm not a competition person."
The pressure wasn't just about cooking. Walking into the competition for the first time meant sizing herself up against a room full of accomplished chefs, many of whom worked at restaurants she admired or had careers she respected.
"You hear where people work, what they've done, and you're like, 'Wait, what am I doing here?'" she says.
Part of her believed she could compete. Otherwise, she never would have boarded the plane.
"At a certain point, you take a bet on yourself," she says.
For a while, the bet looked like a good one. Magbitang quickly emerged as one of the season's strongest competitors, becoming the first chef in Top Chef history to win the first two elimination challenges. A few weeks later, she was gone. After serving a monkfish dish the judges criticized for being undercooked, Magbitang was eliminated. For her, the experience felt strangely hollow.
"They do this fresh, emotional interview right after," she says. "I didn't really feel anything at all."
Instead of returning home, she was moved to a different hotel and separated from the rest of the cast while production continued.
"I slept for two days," she says. "I just stopped thinking."
Eventually, the disappointment caught up with her.
"I told them, 'I don't know if I can do that anymore,'" she says. "I just didn't think I was a competition person."
Nearly two weeks passed before she had another opportunity to cook. By the time Magbitang arrived at Last Chance Kitchen, two eliminated chefs were already there waiting for her. Magbitang won her way back into the competition. When she returned, the reaction from the remaining contestants was immediate.
"They were shocked to see me," she says. "It was a different dynamic."
