Specialty coffee makes frequent cameos within the hallowed pantheon of Top Chef. America’s most popular cooking competition show has featured Stumptown in Season 18, Colectivo in Season 21, and a rousing home espresso moment in this most reason season (number 23) that even featured a WDT tool. But this season offered a caffeinated high point: for the first time ever in Top Chef history, a chef on the show has proudly stated that they are a barista champion!
The proclamation came from during Episode 10, “Hook, Line, and Dinner,” that aired last week. In it, Chef Duyen Ha—founder of The Cuisson culinary studio and and French wine brand Bondle—stated that she was an incredibly competitive person and offered as supporting evidence, among other points, that she was a barista champion. Here’s the clip:
It’s even listed on her Top Chef bio in Food & Wine: “After working in tech and as a barista champion, [Chef Ha] pivoted to culinary arts and studied at France’s prestigious culinary school, Ferrandi Paris, where she graduated at the top of her class.”
Watching this live, my ears perked up when Chef Ha made the claim. Sprudge has been covering Barista Championships for 15 years, and I personally have over a decade as part of that team; I didn’t recall her name, but we’ve covered thousands of competitors at this point and memory can be a murky thing. Genuinely excited about this big TV moment for barista competitors, I turned to Sprudge’s heaving archives to learn more and celebrate barista champion Duyen Ha’s remarkable journey.
The first thing I did was do a search for Duyen Ha on both Sprudge.com and Sprudgelive.com, which together comprise the most thorough record of US Barista Championships and World Barista Championships in the known universe. There were no search results returned for Duyen Ha. But the USBC is far from the only coffee championship around, and Sprudge’s archives only really start to get properly authoritative around 2012, and so the search broadened. Maybe it was a regional or another US Coffee Championships event, or a Latte Art win at a Coffee Fest? Maybe she won New York Coffee Masters, or Crush the Rush, or some other dearly-departed feat of coffee competitional prowess.
But I could find nothing. Even simply googling “Duyen Ha coffee” offered zero insight or detail.
This is odd, but not *that* odd. Specialty coffee culture has long thrived on the margins of polite society. In-house throwdowns, sprodeos, Latte Art Bracket Challenges and so forth are de rigueur in coffee, and often take the form of small scale events with little by way of a paper trail or promotional history. And coffee cultural web records of any sort from the years 2000–2012 are shoddy at best.
There was one lead, though. On her LinkedIn, barista champion Ha listed as one of her previous employers Think Coffee, a Brooklyn-based specialty coffee roaster and cafe for whom she worked from July 2012 and April 2013 (and interned for in 2011). According to Ha’s resume, her list of titles include Wholesale Account Manager and a Farmer Relations Representative, whose duties included leading weekly educational coffee tastings at Think’s Chelsea cafe in Manhattan. This role implies more than just a passing familiarity with specialty coffee; in 2012, while Chef Ha was implied at Think, a New York City barista named Katie Carguilo won the United States Barista Championship, a feat that earned significant coverage in outlets like The New York Times, New York Public Radio, and Slate. Barista competitions started to become significantly mainstreamed around this time, particularly in New York City, where Chef Ha worked in the industry.
We reached out to barista champion Duyen Ha to ask more about her trajectory as a barista competitor. Was it like a 2007 NERBC win or something, lost to time and archival record? But we never heard back. We also inquired with Think, to see if anyone had any recollection of the event in question. “No luck, sorry.”
After countless hours of searching old forum posts, Barista Exchange threads, and Flickr photo sets, we uncovered the truth… on a podcast. Maximum Fun’s TV Chef Fantasy League podcast, the answer we were after was at the 29 minute mark.
The hosts were discussing the episode of Top Chef in question and the very same barista champion claim arose. Turns out, the show’s engineer Gabe Mara actually worked with Ha at Think. Here’s what he had to say:
I don’t want to make any guesses of barista competitions she did outside of think but we would have a barista competition every now and then held at the 14th street location and I believe that Duyen fuckin’ killed it—it was think coffee we had four to five locations so it wasn’t nothing—it would have been 40 people minimum competing in this event.
Boom. Barista Champion Duyen Ha crushed an internal barista competition 15 years ago.
Which got us thinking. As you may have noticed earlier, we referred to Sprudge and Sprudgelive as “the most thorough record of US Barista Championships and World Barista Championships in the known universe,” which it is. But it feels a little less than comprehensive given all… this.
How many thousands of barista champions exist outside of the traditional context have we completely overlooked all these years? Every latte art throwdown, every internal cupping triangulation, all the company-wide Saturday Sprodeos. Barista champions as far as the eye can see. We failed them, the barista champions, and we failed you, the readers.
That’s why we’re introducing a new initiative. Introducing The Barista Championship Database, a user-driven compendium of barista champions the world over. Have you won any manner of competition, throwdown, sprodeo, or cupping triangulation?
Simply fill out the form (honest answers only, please) and officially register yourself as the rightful barista champion that you are. And to recognize the stunning achievement of successfully completing the form, Sprudge will honor your with an official badge officially acknowledging your full and rightful status as a barista champion.
We’re all barista champions. That’s something along the way we forgot, and it’s something Barista Champion Duyen Ha reminded us of. You’re a barista champion too. Or at least you will be once add your name to the hallowed halls of The Barista Championship Database. Join now!
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
