Channel Your Inner Chef

Help upgrade the food at O’Hare International Airport

Have you ever complained about the food at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport (ORD)?

If so, here’s your chance to make a difference.

The airport is partnering once again with HMSHost and inviting chefs of all abilities from across the country to enter the Channel Your Inner Chef competition.

Entrants may be “aspiring, connoisseur, or otherwise.”

The event takes place at O’Hare on March 24, 2020. And while you don’t need to be a master chef to enter this live cooking competition, you do need to get busy.

Entrants need to make an up-to-five-minute video of themselves preparing a favorite original recipe. The video entries need to be submitted by February 17 at the Channel Your Inner Chef website.

Five finalists will be selected from the video entries. Those finalists will be flown to Chicago to compete in a live cook-off in front of an audience and a panel of judges at O’Hare on March 24, 2020.

During the 30-minute cook-off, finalists will be challenged to create an original recipe using some of the food ingredients laid out before them.

The winning dish will be featured on the menu of an O’Hare restaurant.

The grand prize winner will win a VIP experience for two to the James Beard Awards Gala being held on May 4, 2020, in Chicago. The winner will also get two roundtrip airline tickets for a flight anywhere within the continental U.S.

Sound like something for you or someone you know? Find more details at Channel Your Inner Chef.

Below is a video from last year’s event.

StuckatTheAirport.com was on-site for last year’s competition. We got a kick out the fact that, after competing against each other, the contestants got together to cook themselves a feast with some of the fresh fish, meats and other unused ingredients that had been fanned out for them.

“We’re cooks,” one contestant told us, “We not going to let good food go to waste.”