Chef Gabriel Lewis made his MasterChef debut when only 19, moving from fast-casual "Mexican" food to one of the best stories in the Gordon Ramsay corpus of television cooking shows. Not because he won, but because all of us who watched remember the emotional moment when Ramsay, clearly taken with something sincere and promising in Lewis, said after the elimination that he would finance Lewis's culinary education. Putnam City North High School, which has had its share of celebrities, suddenly had another on their hands.

Lewis would make one more appearance on MasterChef a few years later, and in the moment he was eliminated that season, we all learned something about his self-control and the unvarnished dickishness of Joe Bastianich. Rather than call it over, Lewis dove into private cheffing, leveraging his television fame and culinary skills, and now has opened Taco Luv in The Collective, in addition to his private dinners, events, and competitions. He teases his next television project in this episode. We spend a good part of the second half talking about moving into a city's culinary scene after achieving some degree of fame, and settling into the role of being a real -- as opposed to celebrity - -chef. We also spend some time on the next generation of chefs who are already creating names for themselves in the metro, among whom Lewis counts himself a member, but his experience also makes him a peer-mentor to several of them. We also get the scoop on when we can expect Chef Jesus "Chuy" Aguirre's guacamaya sandwich on the Taco Luv menu, which needs to be soon.