Lee Johnson, owner and chef at MontAsia in Fishtail, became the first chef from Montana to compete on the Food Network’s culinary competition show, Chopped. Competitors are given ingredients to create an appetizer, entree, and dessert. The show, Mizuna Matata, aired on March 4 with Chef Lee competing against Jen Williams from Colorado, Soleil Ramirez of Minnesota, and Michael Sibert of South Carolina.
The show derived its name from the first ingredient found in the mystery basket. Matata is from the original phrase in Swahili and the plural form of “trouble” or “entanglement.”
At the watch party at MontAsia, Chef Lee shares, “Mizuna, I made the executive decision to pretend that I knew what it was when I saw it. I knew it was green; it looked like arugula, so I was thinking spicy and peppery, and it turned out to be Japanese mustard greens.”
With the ingredient Mizuna “already challenging,” Johnson adds the basket ingredients for the appetizer round: "It had cherry drink mix or cherry Kool-Aid, and then it had a full crab Rangoon pizza, which I thought was crazy.” He was surprised they stuffed a whole pizza in the basket. However, he was relieved to see fresh salmon fillets.
“I knew I wanted to make a salad right away because I couldn’t think of anything else to do with the cherry Kool-Aid other than the vinaigrette, and that was a good call because the chefs who tried to use the cherry Kool-Aid for other things, there were a couple of misses.”
Lee’s grilled salmon, salad, and crab cakes pleased judges Alex Guarnaschelli, Marc Murphy, and Jet Tila enough to advance him into the entree round.
Johnson traveled to New York to compete and spent two days in the studios. “It is filmed in the Navy Yards in Brooklyn,” Johnson shares, and much was accomplished with the magic of television. While budgets once allowed the film crews to capture clips from each competitor's local space, much of the background footage is created in the studio.
During the filming of the appetizer round, smoke filled the studio, which was not seen in the actual episode. “Two people attempted to smoke the salmon,” Johnson says. “The smoke gun was not hooked up correctly. They didn’t have the cloche, so it’s just leaking smoke everywhere, and we’re all coughing, and I’m burning the crab Rangoon, and we’re about to set New York City on fire filming this TV show.”
Johnson cooked his salmon appropriately and presented a good salad but faced challenges when using the crab Rangoon from the pizza. “The burners were on, off.” When he thought he had turned off the burner, it was on, so his crab ended up charred.
In processing the pizza, “I did a lot of knife skills to remove the top of the pizza from the crust, and then I was going to slice the crust into long, spoke like croutons, and I grabbed the crust and threw it across the room.”
“There’s a hundred people in that room watching,” so although it would have been tempting for Johnson to grab the pizza off the floor, he realized he could not escape trying to resurrect his mistake.
During the competition, Johnson’s biggest fan and supporter, his wife, Yokie, was anxiously monitoring his progress through one of the producers. “The producer really liked Lee. So she gave me her number. And she said I could text her for emergency purposes. So every hour that goes by, I was like, ‘oh should I text her?’ Rose is ‘no, don’t do it, Mama.’”
The producer did send messages to try to calm Yokie down without revealing details and would then relay to Chef Lee that his family was thinking of him.
Yokie, who co-owns the restaurant with Lee, wanted the family to open a brick-and-mortar restaurant in 2022. The couple had operated out of a kiosk in Cooke City during the summers, sleeping in their van for several years. (Flavors Under the Big Sky interviewed Johnson in 2023: https://www.ypradio.org/show/flavors-under-the-big-sky/2023-02-20/flavors-montasia-a-new-chapter-of-flavor-for-fishtail.)
Yokie headed up the team that prepared Lee for his competition. With the help of her mother and their daughter, Rose, she created a 50-page book after reviewing the segments of Chopped from its inception in 2009. She recorded notes on the judges’ backgrounds and likes and dislikes.
However, because of the pressure of being on the show, Chef Lee forgot a keynote Yokie had put into the book. In the second round, the entree round, with the mystery basket ingredients of a fried spaghetti ball, mustard greens, coconut yogurt, and teres major, Johnson did not remember that Alex was averse to pineapple.
When he opened his basket, he was excited to see the teres major as he had served this cut of steak from the shoulder at MontAsia.
He helped the other contestants who struggled with the beef. He tossed his greens with the yogurt and some pineapple. He pulled the noodles out of the ball and created a pasta dish.
He kept seeing the pineapple as a solution to balance the sweetness of the yogurt. “So, within Chopped lore, you are known not to attempt a few things. You’re known not to attempt risotto because you physically can’t do it in a half hour. You’re known not to smoke things, and that had already been broken in round one. So we’ve already broken a lot of taboos this day, and I see this pineapple there, and the pineapple, you do not serve to Chef Alex.” Alex disliked pineapples, which was mentioned in Chef Lee’s prep manual.
Chef Alex ended up liking the pineapple in the greens. " So to get her to react like that, where almost the words failed her and she was sheepishly hiding her head like a girl, it was so cute. It was a home run moment for me.”
While Johnson’s steak was cooked properly and his salad well received by the judges, his overcooked noodles chopped him from the competition.
Johnson accepted his loss with grace and found the experience on Chopped a positive and memorable experience.
“On the show, I wanted to be polite. I wanted to be fun because I didn’t want Montana to have the boring cowboy.” Johnson also ensured that “I didn’t mess up the beef.”
From cooking the salmon correctly, nailing the beef, and convincing Chef Alex to like pineapple, Chef Johnson made history as the first Montana chef to compete on Chopped.
