Kristen Kish wants Top Chef to end a season in Tokyo, and she said it plainly at Deadline’s Reality TV Summit: “We would love to do at least a finale. I’m looking right at you, a finale in Tokyo.” The comment lands while Season 23 is airing largely in North Carolina, giving the Bravo series a fresh location target without changing the show’s current run.
Tokyo and a plane ticket
“I mean, the food is just something to explore and to celebrate,” Kish said. She added that she would go anywhere she was given a plane ticket, including Australia, because her wife is Australian, and even “the middle of nowhere in Cincinnati, Ohio.”
That range fits the series she now hosts. Top Chef has cooked up seasons across nearly a dozen U.S. cities, plus London and Canada, so Tokyo would extend a format that has already treated geography as part of the production design rather than a fixed backdrop.
300-person crews on the move
“We go to a different city, and then within that city and state, we are traveling everywhere. It is a huge production, we are moving 300-person crews,” Kish said. She said the team also builds kitchens in fields and hooks up gas lines where gas does not exist, then makes sure everything still works for chefs to perform at their highest ability.
The current season puts that machinery on display in a racetrack setting. Kish said, “That was a little hot. I kind of wish I got a little roof, but, yeah, I mean, it is amazing where you can set up places to cook.”
Season 23 and Kish’s path
Season 23 matters because Kish is not speaking like a newcomer trying to pitch a dream location. She competed on Season 10 over a decade ago, when she was cooking for 10 people a night and was asked to consider national television. She recalled her reaction bluntly: “I said it absolutely does not.”
She eventually said yes after being told the industry needed more women on television, and she later stepped into hosting after getting the call while flying from Thailand to New York. Kish has since been nominated for the Emmy for Outstanding Host for Reality or Reality Competition Program in 2024 and 2025, which makes her Tokyo pitch feel less like idle wish-casting and more like a host with real leverage over where the show can go next. If the series keeps leaning on its traveling production model, Tokyo looks like a logical stress test for a format that already works far outside a studio lot.
