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" The East Coast Epicurean Amanda Freitag, executive chef, The Harrison, New York City After graduating from the Culinary Institute of America in New York, Amanda Freitag shot up the food chain of Big Apple restaurants, eventually landing the executive chef job at The Harrison, where she builds her signature New American dishes around ingredients she loves. &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t live without olive oil and lemon. They go into my appetizers, main courses \u2014 everything, really!&amp;quot; she says. Though Amanda, 37, spends most of her time in New York, the best meal she&amp;#039;s ever eaten was across the Atlantic: a &amp;quot;magical&amp;quot; 20-course dinner at Arp\u00E8ge restaurant in Paris after interning there. &amp;quot;I ate things I had never seen before. One course was a full frog stuffed with herbs. It was amazing!&amp;quot; Not every exotic ingredient gives Amanda a thrill \u2014 she balked on the day that eel was assigned as her surprise ingredient on The Next Iron Chef. &amp;quot;I had a bad flashback of the last time I made it,&amp;quot; she recalls. &amp;quot;When I tested the eel with the skewer, a stream of juice poured out. I hadn&amp;#039;t worked with eel since.&amp;quot; (For the show, she successfully braised it.) But her secret for any good dish involves the simplest ingredients: pepper and kosher salt. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ll cook steamed broccoli for my mom,&amp;quot; Amanda says. &amp;quot;And she&amp;#039;ll say, &amp;#039;How do you make this taste so good?&amp;#039; It&amp;#039;s because I season the water. It makes a huge difference.&amp;quot; Next page:   The French Foodie Dominique Crenn, chef de cuisine, Luce, San Francisco What do cooking, photography, and law enforcement have in common? For Dominique Crenn, they were all possible career paths. &amp;quot;I remember telling my mom when I was 8 that I wanted to be a chef, and if that didn&amp;#039;t happen I would be a photographer or a policewoman,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Luckily, the food thing worked out well.&amp;quot; Dominique, 44, grew up on a farm in France, where she picked vegetables, milked cows, and helped her mom prepare farm-fresh meals. &amp;quot;My parents would take me to Paris to eat at Indian, Japanese, and Vietnamese restaurants, and we traveled through Europe to experience different cuisines,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I learned to embrace different cooking cultures at a young age.&amp;quot; At her San Francisco restaurant, Luce, Dominique strives to combine farm-to-table freshness with beauty. &amp;quot;I believe that people eat with their eyes first,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;If I&amp;#039;m serving vegetables, I want it to look like a vegetable garden.&amp;quot; But she doesn&amp;#039;t cook as elaborately at home: &amp;quot;When it&amp;#039;s just me, I&amp;#039;ll make sunny-side-up eggs with a toasted bagel and cream cheese.&amp;quot; And after work, there&amp;#039;s nothing she craves more than a good old American hamburger: &amp;quot;The burger at In-N-Out burger is the bomb,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s topped with a secret sauce and caramelized onions. At 1 a.m. after my shift, that&amp;#039;s where I go.&amp;quot; Next page:   The Savvy Restaurateur Holly Smith, chef and owner, Caf\u00E9 Juanita, Kirkland, WA As chef-owner of Caf\u00E9 Juanita, an upscale Northern Italian restaurant outside Seattle, Holly Smith, 42, considers herself as much a businesswoman as a culinary maven. &amp;quot;I have a completely different mind-set now that I have 27 employees to worry about,&amp;quot; says Holly, whose restaurant is home away from home for her and for her son, Oliver, 5. &amp;quot;When Oliver was a baby, he&amp;#039;d be in a backpack while I was on the cooking line,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;So the kitchen has always been a natural place for him to be. He cooks with me at home too. He has his own chef knife and a cooking station.&amp;quot; Growing up with a foodie mom seems to have influenced her son&amp;#039;s palate. &amp;quot;Oliver loves Thai food and sushi, and his favorite meal at Caf\u00E9 Juanita is our rabbit pasta. There was a time when all he wanted to eat was a whole roasted fish, and he&amp;#039;d cry if I cut off the tail or head.&amp;quot; Holly has some entrepreneurial advice for home cooks. First, cook what you love. &amp;quot;For me, cooking comes from a happy place,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s hard to cook with ingredients I don&amp;#039;t enjoy.&amp;quot; And trust your gut in the kitchen: &amp;quot;You don&amp;#039;t have to follow recipes verbatim,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;People say, &amp;#039;I wanted to cook it their way before I try it my way.&amp;#039; Why not try your way first? Don&amp;#039;t be afraid to make it your own.&amp;quot; Tune in to The Next Iron Chef, Sundays at 9 p.m. ET on Food Network. Go back to:  "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.delish.com/restaurants/a1176/the-next-iron-chef-contestants-interview/>