GA sends ‘cheftestant’ to compete on Bravo’s Top Chef. Here’s when, what to know about her

One of Bravo’s most successful competition shows, Top Chef, premieres March 9 and its 23rd season is set in the Carolinas. More importantly, one of this season’s “contestants” hails from right here in Georgia.

Meet Chef Day Joseph

Chef Day Anaïs Joseph moved to Atlanta in 2019 and the Haiti-born, South Florida-raised, chef is a natural contender for the competition-cooking show, and she wants to build something new in her Atlanta neighborhood.

“I like to take leaps of faith,” she said, “because I feel like I’ve been designing this career and designing this life for a while now.”

Joseph built her career in Michelin-starred kitchens, and has been at the helm of two of Atlanta’s most celebrated Afro-Caribbean restaurants, Rock Steady ATL and Apartment 4B. It’s here where she earned a StarChefs Rising Star Award.

Inspired in the South

Relief set in

Joseph found out about season 23’s Carolinas setting just like everyone else did, on Instagram, and she was immediately relieved.

“As soon as I saw it was in the South, I felt a sense of confidence,” she said. “I’ve been living in Atlanta for five years. This was already preparing me for that. I was already studying a lot of Southern foodways, a lot of Gullah Geechee ways and cultures.”

She is confident in how seamlessly her Haitian roots can map onto Southern food culture, and believes that connection isn’t merely superficial. Haitian cooking, much like a lot of the food from the African diaspora, shares deep DNA with Southern food traditions.

Adapting to Atlanta

She did have to reckon with what Atlanta actually wanted. “Every menu has some type of chicken wing, a salmon, a lamb chop,” she said of the city’s Black-owned restaurant scene. “I have never eaten so many lamb chops until I moved to Atlanta.”

But she found a way to adapt to the new expectations without selling herself out, like serving lemon-pepper duck wings, for instance. She doesn’t necessarily want to change it, but “just add my flair to it.”

Top Chef was always the plan

Joseph watched all 22 seasons of Top Chef before filming hers. She is going to draw her biggest inspiration from season 11 cheftestant, Nina Compton. She wants to borrow from her composure and grace, but also be unapologetically rooted in her heritage, like Compton performed on her season.

She shared, “I want to always talk about my food enthusiastically, and stay doing Caribbean food, one way or the other.”

As for whether Top Chef is an accurate measure of a chef’s talent, she’s diplomatic. ”It’s like a small portal into what it looks like when you put chefs in these positions. This is not what these chefs are like all the time.”

Her favorite dish

One of her most favorite items to cook, whether it be for comfort, consolation or just because she’s missing home, is fried red snapper, diri djon djon (Haitian black mushroom rice), green fried plantains, and pikliz, a spicy pickled slaw.

Atlanta Magazine named it the best thing to eat in the city when it was on the menu at Apartment 4B in 2020. She said, “I was already frying things, already pickling things. The pikliz is reminiscent of a chow chow. It’s already very Southern. It’s just spicy.”

Dine with Day Atelier

Instead of a traditional restaurant, she’s opening Dine With Day Atelier in West Midtown Atlanta. It’s a private culinary studio and dining space where she’ll host immersive supper clubs, chef’s table pop-ups, cooking classes, and brand activations.

Top Chef Season 23 premieres March 9 on Bravo with a sneak peek of the premiere on March 3 on Peacock.

I’ll be following her Top Chef journey for as long as it lasts, and you can watch my coverage on the Ledger-Enquirer’s YouTube page and my Instagram.

This story was originally published February 27, 2026 at 6:00 AM.