À la Folie: How Kat Turner Cooks with Chaos, Confidence, and Heart

To the point of madness—that’s how chef Kat Turner describes her approach to cooking, creativity, and life itself. The French phrase à la folie is more than a motto for the Los Angeles–based chef—it’s a compass. Whether she’s cooking brunch at her West Adams restaurant Highly Likely, filming a high-stakes episode of Top Chef, or feeding 200 people on top of a mountain, Turner throws herself in completely—even when self-doubt tags along for the ride. “If I’m scared in the right way, that usually means it’s something I need to do,” she says.

The Road to the Kitchen (and Back Again)

Kat Turner didn’t always want to be a chef. Raised in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, she grew up surrounded by woods, water, and home-cooked meals. Her mother was a gifted home cook with a global cookbook collection, and her grandparents were avid travelers with adventurous taste. Food was part of the household rhythm, but so was art. As a child, Turner spent as much time watching Julia Child and Jacques Pépin as she did reading about painting and performance. By the time she finished high school, she was torn: culinary school or art school?

She chose the latter. Turner studied fine art, theater, and photography, eventually landing in Los Angeles where she acted, danced, and lived full tilt in the city’s nightlife scene. But in 2008, amid the financial crisis and a Hollywood writers’ strike, fate intervened. A friend burned her hand while working the line at a vegan café in Silver Lake and asked Turner to jump in. She did—and something clicked.

A year later, she enrolled at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York, a program known for its mix of classical technique and whole-food, health-conscious cooking. But at 29, after finishing school, she had no intention of working the line or opening a restaurant. “I was going to be a private chef,” she says. “That’s where I saw myself.”

The Private Chef Years

After culinary school, Turner staged at Blue Hill in Manhattan, working unpaid for four months at one of the most respected kitchens in the country. “It was as formative to my education as school itself,” she says. But when her time in New York ended, she stuck to her original plan and moved back to Los Angeles—ready to cook, but not for the public.

Her first major client was Billy Corgan. She cooked for the Smashing Pumpkins frontman both on tour and while he was recording at home in suburban Chicago and Sedona. That role led to another, more secretive one: two and a half years as the full-time private chef for one of the biggest actors in the world, whose name she still can’t share for NDA reasons. She traveled the globe, fed VIPs, and planned menus tailored to strict diets and high expectations.

But the job also came with its limits. “I was doing all of my cooking for another person,” Turner says. “I wasn’t really cooking for myself.” After leaving that role, she was burned out—and ready to figure out what her food actually looked like. A client in New York offered her the perfect playground: an upstate property with a farm, a walk-in fridge in the garage, and every piece of equipment from the back pages of Modernist Cuisine. “It was the first time anyone had given me that kind of free rein,” she says.

There, Turner began to piece together a style of her own—where global influences met Midwestern comfort, and where wellness, experimentation, and fun could all coexist. “So much of my style is informed by everything I did up to that point,” she says. “Refinement meets accessibility. And fun has to be at the core.”

Highly Likely: The Right Kind of Terror

Turner wasn’t looking to open a restaurant—but the restaurant found her. While cooking at a summit event in Utah, she met future business partner Kary Moss, who floated the idea of opening a casual café in Los Angeles. Her first instinct was to say no. “I told him, ‘I don’t know how to do that,’” she says. His response: You can cook brunch for 200 people on a mountaintop in a yurt—you can figure out how to run a restaurant in L.A.

That was enough to convince her to come home, meet the other partners, and take a look at the space in West Adams. It was 12 minutes from her apartment in Koreatown. The vibe was right. The people were right. “It just clicked,” she says.

Highly Likely opened in 2018 as a neighborhood café with a low-stakes concept—coffee and breakfast sandwiches, open until 3 p.m. But Turner saw room to build something more layered, more personal. “I had to be able to put myself into it and have integrity,” she says. At the same time, she wanted the menu to speak to the neighborhood, which was in flux. “The challenge was honoring the history of the community without pandering—while also offering something new.”

Five years later, Highly Likely is still standing—and still evolving. It never closed during the pandemic, except for filming days and holidays. It has grown with the neighborhood, becoming a reliable, creative, and constantly surprising space where regulars might come for a chicken sandwich but leave thinking about the unexpected layers in every bite.

Kitchen Meets Camera—TV and the Performance Gene

If cooking is a form of performance, then Kat Turner has always had the impulse to be on stage. After all, she started in theater and fine art, worked as a go-go dancer, and built a career in food through intuition, hustle, and charisma. But it wasn’t until a friend invited her onto the set of Bong Appétit that she truly merged food with the spotlight.

“I said absolutely not,” Turner recalls of that first pitch. “Competition shows gave me so much anxiety.” But her friend promised a pilot format that would be fun, not cutthroat, and she trusted her. It was the nudge she needed. One appearance led to another—first Chopped, then Beat Bobby Flay, and eventually, Top Chef.

On Top Chef, Turner had what she calls a “traumatizing” start: under pressure and behind on plating, she nearly went home in episode one. “If I’d had literally one more minute…” she says, trailing off. But her food told the story. The judges kept her in. And she kept going.

More than anything, Turner’s presence on screen has felt like a return—to connection, visibility, and audience. “One of the reasons I left private chef work is because I couldn’t be myself,” she says. “I was always in the background.” TV let her step forward. It gave her a platform to be both chef and storyteller, creative and chaotic, polished and fully human. And it helped remind her what had been there all along: a desire not just to cook—but to be seen.

Her Food Today, and Cooking to the Point of Madness

Kat Turner’s food doesn’t aim for perfection—it aims for feeling. “Performance is in my core,” she says. “It has to have energy, emotion, and a little bit of chaos.” Whether it’s a hearty breakfast sandwich served with a wink or a dish crafted for the camera, her food lives in the space between comfort and surprise—the familiar reimagined with curiosity and edge.

“I want there to be accessibility, familiarity,” she says. “But when someone takes a bite, I want them to feel like they’re experiencing something new.” It’s a subtle shift, one that happens on the palate and in the gut—recognition giving way to wonder.

That’s the high she chases. But underneath it, she admits, is a constant current of self-doubt. “I have the worst imposter syndrome of all time,” she says, half-joking. Whether it’s stepping into the kitchen of her first restaurant, cooking for celebrities, or competing on Top Chef, that voice still shows up. “If you’re not getting a little bit of imposter syndrome,” she adds, “you probably are a sociopath.”

For Turner, it’s not something to get over—it’s something to work through. “You get hit with it, and then you push past it. Then it shows up again, and you push past it again.” That push is part of the performance. It’s what drives her. It’s what keeps her food honest.

Her drug, as she calls it, is the moment when she tastes something she’s made and just knows: this is it. “Nobody else is going to make this dish,” she says. “This is a Kat dish.”

And that’s where à la folie comes in. It’s not about chaos for chaos’ sake. It’s about intensity with intention. Passion with precision. Cooking just to the edge of madness—and finding yourself on the other side.