The first chef in this ledger walked into Bobby Flay's kitchen on February 12, 2013 — the show's premiere episode — and beat him with chicken parm.
Grueneberg was already a James Beard nominee and Top Chef finalist at the time. She'd come out of Spiaggia, the Chicago temple of Italian fine dining where she ran the kitchen for years. Bobby's mistake, in retrospect, was thinking that a guy who grills can out-bread a woman who fries chicken in a sauce of San Marzano tomatoes she imports for a living.
Her version is closer to a Milanese than a Brooklyn red-sauce parm: pounded thin, fried hard in olive oil, finished briefly under a quick tomato. She is now the chef-owner of Monteverde in Chicago's West Loop, which is a James Beard Best New Restaurant winner and is, on most weeknights, impossible to book.