The last thing Rachel Willen told her family before she left for the TV studio at 6 am to compete in an episode of Chopped was, “If you hear from me before noon, I got eliminated in the first round.” Her family, who live in Hunterdon County, didn’t hear from her until 10:30 pm.
She called to tell them she had won.
That was June 23, 2011. Because it was a holiday episode and Chopped tapes batches of shows far ahead, Willen and her family had to wait until the Sunday after Thanksgiving 2012 to see it. Three days after cooking Thanksgiving dinner for 18, she invited 30 people over to watch her triumph and enjoy three of her winning dishes.
Since it debuted on the Food Network in 2009, Chopped has crowned more than 160 winners, including Jersey chefs eight times. All kinds of chefs have won. But Willen may be the first to follow her child into the field and win Chopped’s $10,000 prize just one year after graduating from cooking school at 53. This after amassing a résumé starting with actress and model, moving on to stand-up comic, cocktail waitress, bartender, private chef, marketing and creative-services consultant, graphic designer and food blogger.
Along the way, she catered both her weddings: in 1987 to a fellow actor, and in 1993 to Doug Willen, who became a chiropractor and nutritionist and today ministers to many ballet and Broadway dancers. She is devoted to her kids: Maxwell Robbins, 24, a CIA grad who is house butcher and charcuterie maker at Per Se in New York (Number 6 on the San Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants list); and Lily Willen, 16, an honor student at North Hunterdon High School in Annandale.
Raised on his mother’s terrific cooking, Max decided in high school he wanted to be a chef. When mother and son visited the CIA in 2008, Willen was just as smitten as Max. But her priority was securing his future. “She’s been so dedicated to this,” he says. “I’ve had her undying support. She’s kept me going.”
In the fall of 2008, Willen had a lot going on (as usual). In addition to running her marketing business and helping Doug with the nutrition side of his business, she had spent about four of the previous eight years writing a 500-page novel called Ladders to Heaven that a New York agent was shopping around. She had been accepted into an MFA program in creative writing. But after realizing that “I didn’t know if I wanted to be in a room, alone, writing the rest of my life,” she did not enroll. A year later she entered the 9-month program of what was then the French Culinary Institute. She and Max graduated the same year, 2010. A few months later she launched her traveling cooking school, FoodFixKitchen.com.
Both cite Willen’s mother, Trudy Rubin, as their inspiration. Born in Germany, Rubin was deported to Nazi prison camp in France, where she survived three years while looking after the camp’s children. “The French underground helped her and the kids escape before the whole camp was sent to Auschwitz,” Willen says.
After the war, Rubin went to Israel and became a chef. She married, emigrated to the U.S., divorced, raised Rachel and her younger sister, Danielle, in New Milford and worked for 35 years as private chef to an Englewood Cliffs physician and his wife. She might still be working for them if a speeding driver hadn’t run a red light and smashed into her car in 2006. She died five weeks later, at 86.
“When I’m in the 14th hour of work in a day,” says Max, “I think of her. She was a really tough woman.” So is her daughter. Willen prepared for Chopped the way a decathlete trains for the Olympics.
“I watched about 150 episodes on DVR,” she says. “I practiced making bearnaise, Hollandaise and aioli quickly in a blender. I got a souffle down to under 30 minutes. I memorized certain ratios. I threw in crazy ingredients. Some of these guys who work the line do the same thing every day, and somebody else does their prep. They don’t know how to do things on the fly.”
She does. You might say it’s the story of her life.