Lana Lagomarsini

"The best way to get me to do something is to challenge me," says Lana Lagomarsini, who moved with her family from the Bronx to Beacon when she was 15. So far in her career, she has proven that by competing on Bravo's Top Chef, Netflix's Pressure Cooker and the Food Network's Chopped and Cutthroat Kitchen: Knives Out.

How did she navigate those stressful situations? "I'm generally a calm person, but, yeah, I do like a challenge," she says. "I like a challenge with parameters, too - for some reason, it helps me think."

The transition to Beacon from New York City as a teenager was not easy. "We drove out so far and I saw a cow," she says. "I started crying. I had been going to the same school since I was 5 years old." After she settled in at Beacon High School, "I was the cool girl who moved up from the city. I didn't even realize that I had a New York City attitude on me."

While studying journalism at Northeastern University, Lagomarsini began blogging about food and Boston's restaurant scene. Posts about her Game of Thrones pop-up dinners prompted a friend to offer her a part-time job as a line chef. "He said, 'How would you like to put your money where your mouth is?'" says Lagomarsini. "That just started everything."

She found her niche in restaurant kitchens, where chefs were "pirate-y," she says. "They all had tattoos, and they're saying all this cool lingo. They're working so hard, and everything looks so beautiful and tastes so good. Everything's sparkling clean. I was like, 'I want to do this.'"

She tried out for a job with Kristen Kish (who won Top Chef in 2013 and later hosted during Lana's season). "I didn't even have my own knives," Lagomarsini recalls. "I have a plucky attitude, though." The second day of her trial run, Kish told Lagomarsini "nicely" that she needed to go to school or get more experience.

Lagomarsini wanted to go to a French cooking school in Thailand, but her mother noted that she could commute to the world-class Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park. She graduated in 2016 and worked at Restaurant Daniel and Momofuku Ko in Manhattan and apprenticed in Patagonia with Francis Mallman. It was a long way from her first food service jobs at Friendly's and Pizza Hut in Fishkill and Brother's Trattoria in Beacon.

For now, Lagomarsini is a private chef (lanacooks.com) who does pop-ups such as a recent collaborative dinner of fried chicken and sparkling wine at the James Beard Foundation and a residency at Fulgurances Laundromat, a chef incubator in Brooklyn. Her cooking is inspired by the African diaspora and the Great Migration, during which her mother's family moved from a small town in Alabama to New York City.

Lagomarsini grew up learning - and eating - the food traditions passed down by her grandmother, and she's constantly riffing on Southern classics. "I do a lot of things with pot liquor," she says. "I make a lot of chow-chow. Pimento cheese makes its appearance. Cornbread is on the menu in many ways."

Recent experiments include a mash-up of Mexican salsa macha with Nigerian suya (a street food) and a terrine of turmeric dough and oxtails inspired by Jamaican beef patties. "I'm constantly considering what is diasporic food, and that is evolving as well."

Of her cooking shows, she most enjoyed Top Chef. "I didn't have to worry about who likes me and who doesn't, because it doesn't matter as long as the judges like the food." On Season 22, against 14 other contestants, she made it to Episode 11. That's when the judges found fault with her grilled steak with potatoes and Haskap berries (the sage was overpowering and the meat "over-rested").

She is working on a dream project: a supper club series inspired by Georgia Gilmore. "She fed the Montgomery bus boycott," Lagomarsini says. "She called it the Club from Nowhere. It was at her house, but she fed people like Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X." If you haven't heard of her, Lagomarsini says, "that goes to show how much of...