Chris Hanmer Moves To South Dakota To Open Pastry Shop, Admits Top Chef: Just Desserts ‘Wasn’t Fun’

Remember Chris Hanmer, who won Top Chef: Just Desserts Season 2? Yeah, neither do we, because, unfortunately, all we can remember from TC:JD is Morgan Wilson’s devastating kiddie porn scandal. So you can imagine our surprise when we saw Chris in a sleepy little half-hour long video on a local Sioux Falls news site! But there he is, nestled among stories like: “Silent killer lurks in baby boomer blood” and “Extreme cold closes schools, facilities.”

Chris is opening a pastry shop in town, where he has officially moved to from California (by way of Las Vegas). He chats about in his interview, but perhaps most refreshing is his acknowledgment that shooting Top Chef isn’t actually any fun. Said Chris:

“A lot of times people ask me if the experience was fun. And ‘fun’ is not the right word. You know, there’s a lot of things in life that are fun. It was a great experience, but it wasn’t fun, because every day you wake up with this anxiety. Anxiety that just tears you apart, literally from the inside…A shoot day started at 6 o’clock in the morning and sometimes didn’t end until 2 o’clock in the morning the next day. People don’t realize how long you sit and you wait to get 42 minutes worth of footage at the end of the day…[When you’re watching], you’re like, oh man I can’t wait to see what happens next week, and in reality, when you’re shooting, it’s not next week, it’s tomorrow.”

You can check out the interview in full below. Feel free to click around, though. They talk about the weather for like, a full two minutes. South Dakota is darling.

[Argus Leader h/t Eater]

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