‘MasterChef’ Winner Jake Kelley Reveals What Really Won Over the Judges in Season 16 Finale

We have a winner! Jake Kelley, who’d become a standout earlier in MasterChef Season 16 when the “Restaurant Takeover” challenge gave him a touching epiphany about his life and true dreams, managed to nab the win over fellow finalists Heidi Muston and Peter Egede.

The Alma, Michigan, native was representing the culture of Mexico with his cuisine choices and, while judge Tiffany Derry wasn’t completely sold on his rice, he still managed to impress her, Gordon Ramsay, and Joe Bastianich enough to give him the proverbial crown (and cash prize).

To serve up more delicious details about what it was that put him over the top with this win, TV Insider caught up with Jake Kelley!

Congratulations. You must feel like a quarter of a million bucks right now.

Jake Kelley: Just about. I mean, I might even feel like a half-million bucks, honestly.

I think it was pretty clear after the restaurant takeover that you were probably in the best position to win. Did you feel that way, too? Did you have that confidence coming into the finale?

I had some confidence, but at the same time, you walk into the kitchen, immediately, it’s like all thoughts of prior performances slip away because at the end of the day, it’s the same deal as like the NFL or other sports where it’s just next man up, it’s next game on the board. The second you step into the arena, all of your prior victories mean nothing, and all that really matters is the performance that you put on right now. So, I mean, I felt good going into the finale. I felt good going into [the] keeping up with [Tiffany and Gordon challenges]. But I guess what good boils down to in that situation is it feels like the first time I really thought that I had a chance.

I wanted to talk about the emotion of that moment when you made a big career realization. What was it about that challenge that really sunk in with you?

Man, I had a lot to process there. I had felt like I had gone through all of college; I had a plan: Go to pharmacy school, become a pharmacist. But before I really step onto that path, just take a moment here and explore my passion a little bit. Have a responsible plan A, but if this plan B works out, this one that, really, I feel passionate about, then maybe that’s going to be the right avenue to go down. And the restaurant takeover, I mean, it was the pressure, the stimulation. I mean, things never stopped. They never slowed down. There was never a moment to stop and get bored or start letting your mind wander. It was next ticket, next table, next prep from start to finish. And I think that, in addition to some of the other things that I really enjoy, having a couple of teaching moments, having a couple moments of organizational flow, watching us go from the beginning where we were sort of — I wouldn’t say unprepared, but we hadn’t been in that setting before. That was really new for all of us, and to see things sort of come together from start to finish to the point where, by the end of it, I think that we were ready to do another hour or two of tables pretty easily. We had hit a really good flow, and seeing that come together felt like it really fed my heart and soul a little bit. Yeah. So I thought that I had gotten over this idea of romanticizing the idea of working in and running restaurants. But at that moment, I felt like I realized that wasn’t a moment. I wasn’t romanticizing it. That was actually just what really works for me. It felt like I had found an environment more than any other time in my life where I could belong and where I could really excel with the right time and effort put in.

Another thing that was really impressive about that was your leadership skills. You were very calm, and for those of us who’ve watched Gordon Ramsay in the past know he doesn’t take that approach, but he seemed very impressed by how you handled all of that. It also seemed to endear you to your fellow competitors because they were both happy for you in the end. Can you just talk about that and your relationship with them and how that showed in that challenge?

I mean, I worked with Basia [Newman] and Julia [Cili] both at that point. Julia and I obviously worked together around the wall. Heidi and I worked together in the previous two team challenges, so I already had an idea about not only the temperaments of both of them, but sort of how they work under that kind of pressure. I knew that Julia could get a little bit flustered, and that staying calm with her, reminding her what her skills are and where she falls in terms of how capable she really is, would be key. And Heidi is a rock star. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but just making sure that she was keeping herself in a good, I think, almost a professional kitchen flow, working clean, maintaining just her station — because she’s so used to worrying about what everything else is going on, with her big family, with her business, she’s used to being the one that’s like on top of everything — and just getting her into mindset of like working your station, being a gear in a clock almost was the sense that I really wanted to put people down.

And I thought, “Gordon Ramsay’s already coming at them intensely from one side. If I can just keep them on track calmly, that will be really good for us as we go forward.” You can see there’s just a couple moments I’m asking Heidi, “Why are you turning around? Keep your nose to your station.” Julia, just reminding her to calm down. I think what I told her was, “You’re moving too quickly right now. You need to slow down. Your body is moving faster than your brain right now, and it’s going to lead to more mistakes. You know what you’re doing. Take 30 extra seconds if you need to to do something, anything.” … I’m not sure on quotes from Heidi, but I really got in her butt about a couple things, especially her station being clean, leaving her tools around, her tongs, her towels, making sure that she always had those on hand and not behind her or across the station. At one point, she called me “Little G” and felt like she had two Gordon Ramsays coming from both ends.

But I think that being calm with them, acknowledging what their strengths were, not going in too hard on any of their mistakes, while still maintaining a sense of standard and pacing, I think that they really appreciated that, and I think that winning helped earn their respect. But I think the attitude I kept with them and the respect that I maintained for them through the whole challenge is what really drew them into that viewpoint.

Geoff George / Fox

Going into the Top 3, did you know earlier on that Heidi and Peter were going to be your biggest competition in the end?

Actually, yes. If you would ask me to name two finalists, probably very early on, just a couple challenges into it, I would have named Peter and Heidi. Peter is somebody that I identified really early as somebody that’s into cooking. I remember when I got to the hotel, hanging out, one of the first things that I saw that made me go, “Oh shoot, I really need to step my game up, and I need to be putting a lot of work in” is I saw Peter hanging out in the lobby by himself with his cookbooks, taking notes, really just hitting his studying hard. And I thought to myself, “I can’t let this guy outwork me. I’ve got to go.”

And for Heidi, I didn’t get to see much of what she was doing, but after our audition, seeing the dish she put out, hearing some of the feedback from other people about her, [I knew] she’s really a baller. She’s got some incredible finesse. And then just seeing how consistent she was, I mean, I didn’t see a situation where she would fail throughout petition, so I had her pegged pretty early, too.

It seemed like you had a lot of fun with the finale. You stepped up with the little clever names and whatnot. Was that to help you with your confidence, or were you just feeling confident already and just wanting to have fun with it?

I was having a lot of fun. There’s actually a number of times where either the judges or my girlfriend from the crowd are like, “Hey, stop having so much fun and get to work a little bit right now.” I remember Gordon Ramsay at one point comes up and he’s like, “We’re running low on time right now. F**k the crowd. You have a lot that you need to get done. This is a very ambitious dish. You need to push.” And I locked in for those moments. I get serious.

But I think having that crowd there, having all of this thought and preparation I put into these dishes — because it is hours for all of them, and that’s not just cooking or R&D. That’s conceptualizing the flavors, how they go together, what the idea behind each dish is.

The appetizer is especially thought through in terms of a thematic standpoint — the Kraken sea monsters, sort of the mystery of that idea, pairing with lots of smoke, vibrant flavors and visuals coming together. I had a lot of fun with it from start to finish. But I think that in the finale, where it comes across as me having a lot of fun, it’s this sort of idea of a performance for me. I really love performing. I grew up doing theater, marching band, orchestra, all of this other kind of stuff, and I’ve always really loved to entertain people and give them a good time, and I think that that definitely slipped out a little bit in the finale.

Yeah, it did. Fun for us at home, by the way. So I wanted to ask about some of the specifics. Tiffany said that she thought the rice was underdone, and then some of them were giving feedback that there were too many complex elements on the dish. And then obviously your girlfriend said what she said about the truffles. How did you feel about all that coming at you at that point?

The rice… I tasted it, and the part I tasted wasn’t underdone. I feel like what must have happened is there must have been a layer that was properly cooked and a layer that was a little bit underdone. And when I mixed it all together, before that, I got the one that was cooked properly, and when I mixed it, it started to get mixed in with the other cook, and that was not super fun for me. I mean, that was the dish that I feel like, after time expired, came together the best. I was on time the entire cook. I had plenty of time for my plating and garnishing, making sure all of them were identical and really pretty. And then to hear that there was a technical oversight like that, I was just like, “Oh my God.”

As for the truffle, she did tell me to leave them off. I’ll admit to a little bit of vanity with that one. I mean, I thought, “It is the finale. This is my time to ask for anything I can get.” I wanted to have a luxury ingredient on one of my three plates, and black truffle I thought looked really good with the dish from a visual standpoint, almost as a garnish. But that’s the mistake I made. For every other dish I did during the show, I considered things from a flavor standpoint first, and then figured out visuals after that. And the black truffle is the one where I did visual first and then considered flavor after. And I think it shows. I don’t think it was obviously the biggest sin in the world. I don’t think it ruined the dish. I just think it’s like Gordon said: It’s basically irrelevant. It’s not needed. I could have done something else with it, but I do kind of look back at it and cringe a little.

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But obviously, like you said, it wasn’t determinative. So what do you think it was that put you over the top in the end, despite those small hiccups?

I think that it was how thought through every dish was. I mean, coming together for these, I didn’t know how I was going to make time. In practice, I’d been overtime on every single dish, possibly by up to, like, three to five minutes. I remember on one run, I was over 10 minutes on the dessert. And going through, finding surprising ways to put ingredients together, finding very risky meats and making them work, proteins I haven’t tried before, like octopus, or figuring out a way to do a somewhat traditional mole in under an hour, the dessert being what it did. I mean, I still don’t know how I did that. I made the profiterol, the creme diplomat, ice cream, a koori, a ganache, and getting that all together, I feel like I took a lot of really big risks to get really big reward, and I really had a strong theme throughout the entire thing. All three of the dishes were meant to play into each other. They were meant to sort of set up for the next one, and they were meant to really represent not just the cuisine, the culture, I was there to represent myself. I took the time to include ingredients, techniques, flavors that I personally am a fan of. So I think that my finale dishes were a really good representation of not just my skills as a cook, but who I am as a person and a cook. And I think going with all these bold flavors and techniques and really branching out there and going hard on the theme of this season is what separated me at the end of the day.

Circling back to something you said in the beginning, which was you had your plan A being a pharmacist. What does your life look like now that you’ve won this? What does your game plan look like now that you’ve won this?

I have completely changed up the direction I was going. I’ve dropped the notion of going to pharmacy school, earning my pharm B. I moved to Metro Detroit with my girlfriend to sort of get in the heart of Michigan’s food industry to continue this sort of love affair I have with the state I grew up in. I’m full-time in a restaurant right now. I joined up with Vecino in Detroit, a really great Mexican spot. They just made New York Times‘ list of the 41 best Mexican restaurants in the U.S. I really like the food there, and I’m sort of starting to develop myself and my skills as a cook. Aside from just like the conceptualization, the putting together of dishes, now I’m getting this technique, and I’m cutting my teeth… and that’s in addition to putting myself out there, doing a lot of staging, doing one- or two-day internships with kitchens, and just seeing how much of the community I can meet here because it’s a really tight-knit community. I mean, everybody really does know everybody, and it’s been such a treat to go out and either do work and what have you, meet so many people here, and I already have, and I can only imagine more doors are going to open from here on out.