Antonia Lofaso

Some chefs cook to impress; Antonia Lofaso cooks to feed you, and the difference is written all over her food. The Los Angeles chef and restaurateur has spent more than two decades turning the lessons of an Italian-American family table into one of the most beloved restaurant groups in Southern California, while becoming one of the most familiar and best-loved faces on American food television. In April 2025 she added the sport’s biggest prize to her shelf, winning Food Network’s Tournament of Champions VI and the $150,000 that came with it.

Her story is a proper American food story: a girl from a Long Island family of diner workers who trained at the French Culinary Institute, cooked her way through the line at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago, battled her way to the sharp end of two seasons of Top Chef, and then built her own family of restaurants in Black Market Liquor Bar, Scopa Italian Roots and DAMA, all while raising her daughter and becoming the competitor Guy Fieri fondly calls the Warrior Princess. Pull up a chair; this one is a feast.

TL;DR

• Antonia Lofaso (born November 23, 1976, on Long Island, New York) is an American chef, restaurateur and television personality based in Los Angeles.
• She trained at the French Culinary Institute in New York and cooked at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in Beverly Hills before running the kitchen at Foxtail.
• She owns Black Market Liquor Bar (Studio City), Scopa Italian Roots (Venice) and DAMA (LA Fashion District), and is a partner in The Local Peasant and The Chestnut Club.
• A Top Chef: Chicago finalist and Top Chef: All-Stars third-place finisher, she became a fixture on Cutthroat Kitchen and Guy’s Grocery Games.
• In April 2025 she won Food Network’s Tournament of Champions VI, taking the belt and $150,000.
• She is the author of The Busy Mom’s Cookbook and the proud mother of producer Xea Myers.

Antonia Lofaso key facts

Antonia Lofaso: career timeline

From a Long Island diner family to Los Angeles

Antonia Marie Lofaso was born on November 23, 1976, on Long Island, New York, into exactly the kind of family you would invent for a future chef: loud, loving, Italian-American and permanently gathered around food. Restaurants were not an abstraction in her house; they were the family business and the family language. Her mother and grandmother worked as waitresses, and the rhythm of service, the clatter of plates and the pride of feeding strangers well were part of her childhood soundtrack long before she ever tied on an apron of her own.

When Antonia was eight, the family traded New York for Northridge, in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, and the food came with them. The family eventually opened its own diner in Beverly Hills, Fred’s of New York, a little outpost of East Coast comfort in Southern California. For a kid growing up between two coasts, food became the through-line: Sunday sauces, holiday tables groaning with Sicilian-rooted classics, and the understanding, absorbed rather than taught, that cooking for people is a form of love.

That upbringing still flavours everything she does. Ask her about her restaurants and the conversation comes back, again and again, to family: recipes with grandmothers attached to them, dining rooms designed for long dinners, staff treated like relatives. It is no accident that when she finally opened an Italian restaurant of her own, she named it for roots.

Training, hustle and first kitchens

The French Culinary Institute years

Lofaso’s formal training began at the French Culinary Institute in New York City (the school later known as the International Culinary Center), where she learned the classical grammar of the kitchen: knife work, mother sauces, discipline, repetition. But what makes her story remarkable is what she was doing at the same time. While studying, she worked as a manager at Justin’s, the Manhattan restaurant owned by Sean Combs, learning the front-of-house and business side of hospitality in one of the most scrutinised dining rooms in the city.

That double life as culinary student by day and restaurant manager by night set the template for a career built on outworking everyone in the room. She has spoken often about hustle as the great equaliser in kitchens, and about how understanding both sides of the pass, the cooking and the running of the business, shaped the restaurateur she would become.

Learning the line at Spago

Back in Los Angeles, Lofaso did what serious young cooks in that city dream of doing: she earned a place in the kitchen at Spago Beverly Hills, the flagship of Wolfgang Puck’s empire and one of the most demanding fine-dining kitchens in America. On that line she absorbed the standards of a world-class operation: the precision, the pace, the refusal to send out anything less than excellent. She banked the kind of experience no school can teach.

From Spago she went on to run the kitchen at Foxtail in West Hollywood, stepping up from cook to chef and proving she could lead a brigade of her own. By the time television came calling, Lofaso was no TV creation; she was a line-hardened Los Angeles chef with classical training, big-room experience and a decade of graft behind her.

Building a Los Angeles restaurant family

In 2011 Lofaso opened her first restaurant, Black Market Liquor Bar, on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City: a moody, convivial gastropub where inventive small plates meet serious cocktails, and where the Valley discovered it had a genuine neighbourhood destination. The room quickly became a local institution, and it announced Lofaso’s particular gift for restaurants that feel personal rather than corporate.

Two years later came the heart of the group. Scopa Italian Roots, opened in 2013 on the Venice side of Los Angeles, is Lofaso’s love letter to the Italian-American table she grew up at: a dark, buzzy dining room serving the kind of red-sauce-and-beyond cooking that has made it a fixture of the city’s Italian dining scene for more than a decade. The name says it plainly: this is cooking about where she comes from.

In 2017 she pushed in a new direction with DAMA, in the Los Angeles Fashion District downtown: a lush, tropical-feeling space with Latin-inspired coastal cooking and one of the prettiest patios in the city. Add her partnerships in The Local Peasant, a gastropub in Woodland Hills, and The Chestnut Club, a celebrated cocktail bar in Santa Monica, and you have a proper Los Angeles restaurant family, each room distinct but all unmistakably hers.

She is not done. In recent interviews Lofaso has talked warmly about her next chapter, including plans for a restaurant on the Las Vegas Strip, a city she already calls a second home after renovating a Las Vegas home kitchen she describes as the first space she has ever designed purely for herself.

Television: from Top Chef to the TOC belt

Lofaso’s television career began in 2008, when she competed on the fourth season of Bravo’s Top Chef, set in Chicago, and cooked her way to fourth place. She was such a compelling competitor, composed, technical and quietly ferocious, that she was invited back for Top Chef: All-Stars in 2010 and 2011, where she went two better and finished third against the strongest field the show had ever assembled.

Food Network took notice. From 2013 to 2017 she served as one of the rotating judges on Cutthroat Kitchen, Alton Brown’s gleefully devious sabotage competition, and in 2016 she won the show’s special Judging the Judges tournament, beating fellow judges Simon Majumdar and Jet Tila and Iron Chef Geoffrey Zakarian. She became a mainstay of Guy’s Grocery Games as both judge and champion competitor, forging a long-running on-screen partnership with Guy Fieri, who admiringly nicknamed her the Warrior Princess. In the summers of 2022 and 2023 she hosted her own series, Beachside Brawl, and in late 2022 she co-hosted Guy’s Ultimate Game Night.

Then there is Tournament of Champions, Food Network’s bracket-style heavyweight competition, where Lofaso has been a fixture since the beginning as a six-time competitor and perennial favourite. She reached the finale of Tournament of Champions V in 2024, and in April 2025 she finally took the title, defeating Sara Bradley in a finale that handed the chefs wagyu beef, huitlacoche and a sausage stuffer, plus wildcard demands that one dish be spicy and one sticky. The win, complete with the $150,000 grand prize, was celebrated across the food world as a career crowning long overdue.

Beyond the restaurants

Away from her own dining rooms, Lofaso has built a small universe of food projects. In 2012 she published The Busy Mom’s Cookbook, a warm, practical collection drawn from her life as a working single mother who still insisted on real dinners. She founded Chefletics, an apparel line designed for people who actually work in kitchens, and ships her cooking nationwide through Goldbelly. She is a regular at the great American food festivals, including the South Beach Wine and Food Festival, and shares her career lessons generously, from student talks at the Institute of Culinary Education to campus lecture series.

Through it all runs the same message she gives every young cook: hospitality is a craft you build with your hands, your hustle and your heart, one shift at a time.

Restaurants

Awards and honours

Watch Antonia Lofaso

See Antonia in action in this video.

Signature dishes

Lofaso’s cooking is Italian-American soul filtered through a classically trained Los Angeles sensibility. At Scopa Italian Roots that means the food of her family’s table done with real technique: handmade pastas, generous red-sauce classics and dishes that taste like Sunday at an Italian grandmother’s house. At DAMA she swings toward sunny, Latin-inspired coastal flavours, while Black Market Liquor Bar shows off her playful, globe-trotting small-plate side. And in competition she is famous for cooking food with a point of view under absurd pressure, never more so than in the Tournament of Champions VI finale, where wagyu beef and huitlacoche became a title-winning plate.

Cookbooks

Antonia is the author of books including The Busy Mom’s Cookbook.

Personal life

Lofaso lives in Los Angeles and remains gloriously close to the big Italian-American family that raised her. In 2000 she welcomed her daughter, Xea Myers, with her longtime partner, the rapper and actor Heavy D, who sadly passed away in November 2011. Lofaso raised Xea while building her restaurants, and has often said that motherhood shaped her cooking and her career more than any kitchen ever did. Xea has grown into a television producer whose credits include Guy’s Grocery Games, meaning mother and daughter have shared a set as well as a table.

Antonia in context

Antonia Lofaso is one of many chefs and food personalities profiled on Pickup Table 4, alongside Anne Burrell and Bobby Flay.

Follow Antonia Lofaso

Antonia Lofaso — official · Instagram

Antonia Lofaso FAQ

Who is Antonia Lofaso?
Antonia Lofaso is an American chef, restaurateur and television personality from Los Angeles, known for her restaurants Scopa Italian Roots, Black Market Liquor Bar and DAMA, and for her appearances on Top Chef, Cutthroat Kitchen, Guy’s Grocery Games and Tournament of Champions.

What restaurants does Antonia Lofaso own?
She owns Black Market Liquor Bar in Studio City, Scopa Italian Roots in Venice and DAMA in the Los Angeles Fashion District, and is a partner in The Local Peasant in Woodland Hills and The Chestnut Club in Santa Monica.

Did Antonia Lofaso win Tournament of Champions?
Yes. After reaching the finale of Tournament of Champions V in 2024, she won Tournament of Champions VI in April 2025, defeating Sara Bradley and taking home the belt and $150,000.

Has Antonia Lofaso written a cookbook?
Yes: The Busy Mom’s Cookbook, published in 2012, full of family-friendly recipes drawn from her life as a working chef and mother.

Who is Antonia Lofaso’s daughter?
Her daughter is Xea Myers, born in 2000, whose father was the late rapper Heavy D. Xea works as a television producer, with credits including Guy’s Grocery Games.

Where did Antonia Lofaso train as a chef?
She trained at the French Culinary Institute in New York City and cooked at Wolfgang Puck’s Spago in Beverly Hills before running the kitchen at Foxtail in West Hollywood.

Sources and further reading

This profile draws on reputable references including Wikipedia, Food Network, chefantonia.com, Warner Bros. Discovery press release, Institute of Culinary Education.