Q&A with East End Bartender and MasterChef Contestant Brynn Weaver

Fans of “MasterChef” know the cooking series has a way of testing amateur chefs’ skills as well as their ability to keep cool in the kitchen as they compete for a grand title and a $250,000 prize. This year, Providence resident Bynn Weaver has been holding her own against nineteen other contestants on the show’s thirteenth season. A bartender at the East End, Weaver has spent her career watching other chefs from within the industry and dreams of one day opening her own restaurant.

So far in the series, which airs Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on Fox, Weaver has wowed the judges with her Federal Hill-inspired chicken cacciatore and barely scraped by in a challenge where she and other contestants had to cook for 101 firefighters and emergency personnel. On Wednesday, Aug. 9, she’ll face a baking-themed challenge as the series celebrates its 250^th episode. Weaver spoke with Rhode Island Monthly this week about what led her to the show and where she likes to eat when she’s at home.

 

Are you originally from Rhode Island?

I am not. I’m from a little bit all over. I was mostly raised in Seattle. I spent a good chunk of my twenties in New York, and then I moved up here, and then Detroit for a little bit, and then back here. The East Coast is my chosen home and I love Providence, that’s why I’ve come back here. My husband’s from here. It’s where I consider home now as an adult.

 

What brought you to Rhode Island?

That is a funny story. I was with an ex-boyfriend in New York, and I was ready to leave New York. He wanted to go to grad school, and I said wherever you want to go besides Chicago, because I would rather just stay in New York. We ended up here. We very quickly broke up, and I was like, ‘Should I move back to New York? What do I do?’ I had a beautiful loft apartment right on Thayer Street, was working down on Wickenden Street, and could walk to work and have my own beautiful apartment for the first time. I was like, what am I doing considering leaving? I don’t really know anybody and I don’t know what I’m doing, but I very quickly made some of the best friends of my life, met the man who became my husband, and just fell in love with the city.

 

You’ve worked at the Flatbread Company as a bartender, right?

I did very briefly. I worked there for just a couple months as restaurants were reopening after the pandemic. My husband’s worked there forever, a lot of my best friends and his best friends all worked there, and it just felt like a safe bet. I’ve been at the East End on Wickenden Street for a little over two years now. It’s a great place. I love it. It’s one of my favorite jobs I’ve ever had, incredible crew.

 

So you’ve always been around the restaurant industry. Have you ever worked in a cooking role?

I have, very briefly. This is something I made very clear to MasterChef. I technically have worked in kitchens. I worked as a brunch line cook at a medieval-themed dive bar in Seattle called the Canterbury, briefly. Then I worked for this amazing woman, Makini Howell, who’s like the vegan queen of Seattle. She’s an amazing chef, and she was a huge inspiration to me. I worked front-of-house at one of her cafes and then transitioned to working in the back of the cafe doing these amazing vegan sandwiches and burgers, and then opened up her fine dining restaurant as a front-of-house manager and supervisor. She was the reason I’m probably where I am. She filled me with confidence and was massively important.

Her family was vegan, they did vegan Southern comfort soul food, so that was all she knew and she was incredible at it. It was funny — I didn’t go back to the kitchen after this, so what I did learn about cooking from her was all vegan. I never knew how to cook meat. I was terrified of trying to do it. But I know how to make a sauce and a salad and all of these things from her.

 

What made you want to apply for the show?

When lockdown happened, I was a front-of-house manager at Ogie’s over on the West Side. We were getting rid of our produce and everything, and I ended up with all these random ingredients. And so I’m stuck at home with this five-pound bag of onions like, I don’t know what I’m doing. I started making onion jam, and onion pickles, it was like, ‘You know what? I think I learned more than I thought from just being in restaurants, about the kitchen and the way it works.’ I started cooking more at home during the pandemic. And then my husband is a big fan of the show and was like, ‘You can do this. You should absolutely do this.’ So I applied to do it.

 

In this season, you’re one of the chefs representing the Northeast. What was that like?

The Northeast is an interesting region to represent because it is very much a melting pot of America. I think the more challenging aspect was trying to represent New England well. I tried to focus on my favorite things about New England like the seafood and the really local produce. In the first challenge after the auditions, it was state fair food. And I’m like, obviously, I’m doing clam chowder. I wasn’t in the top or bottom that episode, so you don’t see it, but I did make a really great New England clam chowder. I was really happy to do so. I brought a little bit of fun flair to it because all of my family originally is from New Mexico, so I have the whole country to draw from. I took some of the flavors from my mom’s family’s cooking and I did roasted corn and poblanos and cilantro and threw that into a spicy twist on my clam chowder, and I was super happy to do it. I was bummed you couldn’t see it on air. I did post a remake of it on my Instagram that I’m pretty proud of.

Also, in the chicken challenge that we just did, I did a cacciatore. Obviously, Rhode Island, super Italian. I explained this a couple times in my audition process that what I was inspired to start to cook here in Rhode Island was not the pasta dishes. Because I live on the West End, I can walk down to Atwells where there’s an Italian flag right down the middle of the street and buy some of the best fresh pasta there is. So that’s not something I have spent a ton of time learning. I like cooking the really homey Italian dishes that you might not always find in restaurants. So cacciatore, I’ve done saltimbocca for some of my audition prep things. It’s not what you’d find in a restaurant but is very much home Italian cooking.

 

 

What’s been the most challenging moment on the show that we’ve seen so far?

The team challenge by far. There is nothing that can prepare you for that. If you’ve watched the show, and like me I had watched the show, I’d seen it. I’d seen what it would be like. I knew what I was in for. I thought I knew what I was in for. I did not actually know what I was in for. It was absolutely brutal. I would never want to do it again. That was tough. We’re all home chefs, and I’m really proud of the idea of the dish that we made and the concept that we were working with, but at the end of the day, I work in the industry, I work in restaurants. I don’t know that any chef that I’ve worked with would’ve thought that was a great decision to cook all those pork chops outside in the wind. So that was tough.

 

How’s it been like interacting with the judges?

They were fantastic. I think the biggest surprise for me was Joe [Bastianich]. He gets this edit as being the critic, the harsh one, and it comes across so differently in person. I actually found him to be very much a breath of fresh air in all the drama. He speaks very evenly. He’s not a lot of drama — even if he comes to you and says, ‘Hey it’s not great,’ you kind of trust it because he’s talking to you like a real person. I was prepared to be scared of him and then he was always the one I was looking to. I was like, ‘This guy is going to tell me straight what’s up.’ And I loved that.

 

If you win the $250,000, what are you going to do with it?

I’m not even sure. I think it will be something food-related, business-related. Personally for me, post-COVID, my whole dream my whole life had been opening a bar and restaurant. But to see how much that market has shifted — I already was aware of some of the difficulties of it. My entire career has been making a list of dos and do-not-dos when I have my own place. But COVID threw a curve ball at us in terms of what’s even possible and how much can happen outside of your control. For me, it’s now this look at, ‘Is a brick and mortar what I actually want? Is there something involved with a pop-up or a traveling something?’ We’re waiting for my husband to get back, and we’ll talk about what we want should that be the case.

 

Your husband works as a chef, right?

He is. He’s worked at Flatbread in Providence for a long time, but he does a lot of other things and is off cooking now in Alaska. He’s at this really remote fishing resort called Royal Wolf Lodge. He is with another chef from Providence who had been out there before and took him as his sous-chef this year.

 

That sounds like he’s living the adventure.

Yeah, we both got a little bored post-pandemic and were like, ‘Let’s do some stuff.’ And we ended up doing a lot of stuff this year.

 

I’m glad you brought up COVID. Two years ago, my editor did a story about some of the mental health challenges faced by restaurant employees, especially as restaurants began to reopen after the initial shutdown. How do you think the industry is faring today?

Those main challenges — the protocols and the customers as you mentioned and dealing with that — that’s not the same as it was right when we reopened. Things do feel what you could call more normal now. But the landscape of the restaurant [industry] has changed. This is something that I think about a lot. There’s one positive, which is the standards that were held for small businesses have changed. Simply saying, ‘We’re short staffed today,’ wasn’t really an option. Simply saying, ‘We’re doing as much as we can,’ wasn’t an option. And that being an option now has changed the quality of life for those of us who work in the industry. We used to have to go to work sick all the time with a cold or whatever. We don’t have to do that anymore. And that has been such a positive for how we function. I think also a lot of people who weren’t completely dedicated to the industry — who didn’t choose it as their main career and want to continue — left, and now we have this smaller group of people who are true professionals and who really genuinely care about it.

 

That’s great to hear.

I think so, and I hope that’s not just my experience. I’m not everyone in the industry, but I think that’s a broad feeling across it.

 

What are some of your favorite dishes to cook or ingredients to work with at home?

Coming from a bartender’s perspective, for me it starts with the concept of flavors that I want to work with. Sometimes it will come from a cocktail. I was putting tamarind in a cocktail and I had never considered cooking with tamarind, and I was trying to figure out, ‘How do I get this flavor into my dish? How do I work with that?’ I ended up making this really cool coffee-tamarind barbecue. And then it can go on anything. Proteins for me are usually an afterthought, which is probably not a good thing to say, but they’re a vessel. My other favorite way to go is going to farmers markets and local markets and seeing what’s available from local farms, local seafood providers or meat farms and working with what’s there.

 

Do you have a favorite farmers market?

I’m right by the Armory, so that Thursday farmers market is fantastic. And then I’m also right by Urban Greens, which is a really small co-op grocery store over here. I never know what’s going to be in the meat department, I never know what’s going to be in the produce department. So I can just go and be like, ‘I guess this is what’s for dinner,’ and I will figure it out from there.

 

What are some of your favorite spots to eat in Providence?

I love Bayberry Beer Garden. I love that nice balance of casual atmosphere while still being very beautiful with incredible food. They’ve given themselves a really great way to do a constant rotation of what the food is and do all these fun specials. That’s fantastic. Aguardente — have you been there yet? My God, it’s so good. It’s so good, and I feel like it has this sexy vibe that I personally have found lacking in some other places. I really like Red Door. They’re just cool. I haven’t gotten to go yet, but I’m really excited about Gift Horse, the new Oberlin spot. I know they just opened a week ago and I love Oberlin, so I can’t wait to go check them out as well.

 

Providence is so chock full of amazing places, it’s hard to pick.

It is, and I don’t get to go consistently. What else? Pizza Marvin is fantastic. I think they’ve done a great job of being casual, affordable, but getting to do these really fun collabs and pop-ups and specials that get them to lean into their specialties while still being really approachable. I live right around the corner from one of the first Orale Taqueria spots and I would go there every day just for a side of rice and beans. They were the first people in town to do birria tacos. Just great tacos.

 

Anything else you want to share with viewers?

I want to say thank you to everyone who’s watching. I’ve had people pop by the bar that I’m at right now, the East End, to say that they’re watching. It’s so crazy, but thank you so much to everyone who is [watching], and I hope everyone sticks it out. I know some people who have been fans of the show aren’t in love with the regions [format], but I think it’s really cool and interesting. And I think they actively went for finding people who have been underrepresented in terms of where they’re form and how they’re cooking and what they cook, and I think that’s a cool different take. I think it’s fun to see what everybody’s up to. To see that there’s so much going on in the world culinarily that isn’t just coming from L.A., New York, the big names. It’s cool to remember there’s so much of America that has so much to offer that isn’t just from these big metropolitan hotspots. There’s so much to be said for the smaller cities in America. Me, I’m an ex-Seattle, ex-New Yorker who fell in love with little baby Providence. and there’s so much here that’s fantastic, and I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s true in all these other little cities across the country. I think watching this season with that angle and being excited about that is the way to go about it.

 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

 

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