Seattle’s Shota Nakajima to appear on Season 18 of Bravo’s ‘Top Chef’

In a year of dark days for restaurateurs, here’s a big bright spot for one Seattle chef: Shota Nakajima is one of 15 contestants who will compete on Season 18 of “Top Chef.” The season — filmed in Portland last year, during the COVID-19 pandemic — will premiere April 1 on Bravo.

Nakajima says that the show did “an amazing job of ensuring safety precautions” for the contestants,” allowing “all of us to fully focus on being chefs and competitors.”

A three-time James Beard Award Rising Star Chef semifinalist, Nakajima had opened his second Seattle spot — a Japanese bar-and-skewers-grill called Taku — just five days before the March 15, 2020, COVID-19 dining-room shutdown. After reopening briefly for takeout, he decided to keep Taku shuttered until times are less uncertain, saying his team was exhausted and it wasn’t penciling out. Meanwhile, the pandemic also brought his decision to permanently close his original restaurant, Adana, a more upscale endeavor (which he’d begun as even higher-end Naka). Closing Adana down forever was bittersweet, he said, but he was able to get out of his lease, choosing to focus his efforts on reopening Taku when he feels the time is right and his team will be safe. He calls the last year “an emotional roller coaster.”

Now, Nakajima says, “The experience of shooting the show — and in the Northwest, no less — has left me humbled, happy, and focused on pushing forward with exciting projects and opportunities, refocused on my happy place: cooking and creating for others.”

Nakajima is no stranger to reality TV kitchens — he appeared on Food Network’s “Iron Chef Gauntlet” in 2017.

“I want to be on Top Chef because there’s a big part of me that carries Japan on my back, and I want to be a stronger and better mentor and chef,” Nakajima says in the video trailer for the show that Bravo released on Monday.