The Season 16 premiere of Top Chef, “The Fastest 2 Minutes in Cooking,” is set at Churchill Downs, the legendary thoroughbred racetrack where the famous Kentucky Derby is held every year in Louisville, Kentucky. There, the Top Chef hosts, Tom Colicchio and Padma Lakshmi, welcome the 15 American chefs to the competition. One of the 15 contenders is Caitlin Steininger.
Caitlin Steininger, who was trained at Le Cordon Bleu in Chicago, is the star of the popular website Cooking with Caitlin with her sister Kelly Trush. Sisters Trush and Steininger, a wife and mother of four, opened their first restaurant CWC, The Restaurant in 2017 in Wyoming, Ohio. The small suburban town (population 8,536) outside of Cincinnati, is the hometown of Otto Warmbier, the 22-year-old college student (University of Virginia, London School of Economics) who was arrested in North Korea in 2016. When freed and returned to the United States in Cincinnati in 2017, Warmbier was in a comatose state and died six days later. A funeral for Warmbier was held on June 22 at Wyoming High School, which was ranked the 2nd best Ohio high school by US News in 2017. (Warmbier graduated from the school in 2013 as Salutatorian.)
Steininger and Trush are currently working on opening another restaurant in Wyoming — Station Family + BBQ. Trush told the local TV station the second restaurant is “a love note to Wyoming.” She added: “We feel like we can breathe life and add light back to that space, and our little town needs it. There’s an opportunity, and we can do it.” Top Chef airs Thursdays at 9 pm on Bravo.
