Former Clearwater Beach resident Spike Mendelsohn has had a bit of a rough time as a “cheftestant” on Bravo’s “Top Chef” series this season. The 27-year-old chef, who cooks Vietnamese food at Mai House in Manhattan, N.Y., has been a candidate for elimination twice already in the show’s few short weeks. Making matters worse, food blogs likfe Eater have had a field day with him, mocking everything from the hats he wears to his plans to open a string of high-end burger joints in Washington, D.C. One commenter on the message board at Chowhound compared him to Kevin Federline.

Mendelsohn got his start in the kitchen when he was 13, washing dishes at his family’s Pepin Restaurant on Fourth Street in St. Petersburg. After graduating from Admiral Farragut Academy boarding school on Park Street, he helped run the restaurant at age 19 while his parents tended to his sick grandfather. When his parents returned, they sent him to cooking school. Afterward, he cooked in European kitchens before coming back to work in Manhattan.

Mendelsohn says he auditioned for season three of “Top Chef” in Miami, but didn’t make the final cut.

I had wanted to record my interview with him for a podcast, but the good folks at Bravo nixed that because they didn’t want it to compete with the multimedia at their own site. (You can see his photo diary from the show here. He also delivered my favorite line from the show so far this season when talking about the lesbian couple competing on the show: “No big deal. They can go home together.")

Will he go home during tonight’s episode? Hard to say. He’s definitely been targeted for early exit in previous weeks.

You can see him in the preview of the series:

So, in the place of the usual Table Conversations podcast is a transcript:

Tell me about the whole growing up in the Bay area thing and how you got into food.

I went to Admiral Farragut Academy. That was the high school I went to. That’s my home base. And, oddly enough, my parents lived in Clearwater Beach. I still did the boarding school because, I guess, I was a bad-ass kid.

But first and foremost, my parents ran Pepin’s Restaurant on Fourth Street [in St. Petersburg] and they were always there. It’s not like they didn’t have time for me, but they had their hands really full with a restaurant that they needed to make successful. We all agreed that I should go to military school and it really turned out for the best.

But I lived in Clearwater, so on the weekends, if I wasn’t usually in trouble and having to work off hours at Admiral Farragut, I’d spend most of my time at the beach. I love the beach. I used to race Wave Runners out there and sail boats. I spent a lot of time at the beach.

So the food thing came in through the family?

My whole family is in the restaurant business. We come from Montreal and we have a bunch of restaurants there. My parents landed this Pepin’s Restaurant and after school, I’d usually have to go there and wash dishes. I started washing dishes there when I was, like, 13 years old. Way before I went to Admiral Farragut, I was already working in the restaurant. It was a family business, but I just kind of slowly moved to stations. I did a couple years in dish and got my ass kicked by all the line cooks.

It came to the point when I was 18 years old … a stupid, punk kid ... I want to go do my own thing. My parents were in the restaurant business and I didn’t want to be in that business, so I went and did the club thing. One of my roommates was the general manager at Pirahna, so I went and opened up that club. I opened up GameWorks and Improv. It was back when Ybor City was getting that whole second wave of marketing and publicity. I spent some time there.

What really finally reeled me into the business was that my grandfather was dying of cancer and my parents called upon me to come to the restaurant and help out. They were going to spend pretty much of a year in Montreal with my grandfather because he didn’t have too much time to live. My mother wanted to go to him and spend time with him, but they had this 350-seat, fine dining, well-established restaurant and no one to run it for them.

So at around 19 years old, I went to the restaurant and just ran with it. They were back and forth about six trips during the year, but at the end of the year they came back to find the restaurant in better shape than ever. I think I remember my mother saying that if I stayed for another year after they came back after my grandfather died that she’d send me to any culinary school that I’d want. So, I just fell in love with the business, took it as a challenge and worked another year at Pepin’s and did what I could do with the food.

This was a restaurant that I grew up in since I was 13 years old. I learned all the wrong things to do as well as some of the right things to do.

When you say that you worked there, what were some of the things you were doing?

There was a time when I was working in dishes, or something like that, and a saute cook hadn’t come in and my mother [Catherine, pictured at right]… she cooked with me on the line. She was the chef at the restaurant. She called me over and she was, like, “Listen, you’ve gotta do this.” She was really crazy at that time. She was really nervous. No one had shown up. So I was, like, flipping saute pans and closing oven doors and just cooking. It just came real natural. I grew up in my grandfather’s restaurant in Montreal, too, so the whole thing just came real natural.

She kept her mouth shut at that point because she didn’t want to blow my ego out at that point. She somehow managed to keep me straight and keep cooking in the kitchen.

You then went to culinary school. Where at?

I decided to go to the Culinary Institute of America. When she told me she’d send me anywhere, I guess I went to the best, right? I was pretty amazed that they were capable of sending me there.

You got out of CIA when?

In the beginning of 2005.

So, the “Top Chef” thing… had you auditioned before?

I had a buddy on “Top Chef” 2 and he said it was nothing but the best experience for him, but I was skeptical because I take my profession really, really seriously. I’ve paid my dues. At a very young age, I’ve paid a lot of dues. I traveled to France to cook, I went to Luxembourg. I’ve gotten my ass kicked in the business. I didn’t want to risk everything by going on a reality show. You really don’t know what to expect when you do that.

But I had some guts and I signed up for Season 3. I did real well through the process and got all the way to the final interviews, but then they called me back and they were, like, “Sorry, we’re not going to take you on for this episode.”

I was, like … you … I was cussing every single word. Are you serious? I went through all these interviews and pictures and I signed my first-born away and you’re refusing me now? I was, like, “Your show sucks! It’s gonna go down in flames!” I wrote an e-mail to them and I was so pissed off. But then they called me back for Season 4 and I was, like, “Oops.”

Tell me a little about the process from a cook’s point of view. I know on “Iron Chef,” they say ahead of time, “You have these three ingredients, come up with a menu for each.” On your show, you have the quickfire challenge, you have the elimination round … is it as it seems on TV? Do they just flip a board and off you go?

It’s reality. They are not pulling the wool over your guys’ eyes. I understand what they do on “Iron Chef,” but on “Top Chef,” it’s the real deal. You know what I mean? It’s completely the real deal. You have completely no idea what’s going on when you walk into that room. You have no clue who the judges are going to be. You have no idea what you’re going to be cooking or how much time. You don’t know anything.

That was the biggest challenge for me, because … there are a couple different types of chefs in this business. There are people who think on the fly and come up with dishes really, really quickly. I can do that if someone walks into my restaurant and says, “I don’t want anything on the menu. Give me something.”

I think a chef should be able to do that.

Yeah, they should be able to do that. But the problem lies with me sometimes that I’m much more of a methodical chef. I like perfecting dishes. It really takes me two or three weeks to get a dish I started one day with to get it to the point I want it to be. So these quickfire challenges, you get half an hour or 15 or 20 minutes to do something. It’s unfamiliar, first of all, and your brain is just wracking. To me, that was the toughest thing, the quickfires.

Why was that?

Like I said, I’m a laid-back methodical chef. If I’m coming up with a special for my restaurant, I’m thinking about it at the market that morning. I’m thinking about it later when I’m grabbing something to eat. Then I get inspired by something, then I try this out. Then I add something, then take away. I simplify it. And at the end, the result is, it’s 6:30 p.m. and I have people coming through the door and I’m putting the finishing touches on my dish that just took me eight hours or seven hours to get to that point. So, coming up with stuff off the fly was difficult, but it was fun.

When you start out with a cast of 16 people, it’s hard enough to get face time – I don’t even know if that’s what your goal is. Anyway, it’s hard to establish an identity. I think some of that is up to the editors and whatnot. Unless you have a fauxhawk.

A what?

A fauxhawk.

Right.

That’s important.

Right.

So is the hat something you’re wearing new for the show?

The hats, I wear hats all the time.

Alright. I don’t mean to go way off culinary topic here, but there is something about standing apart from the herd.

The restaurant business is show business. You know what I mean? Anyone who tells you anything different, they don’t know what they’re getting themselves into. That comes from a lot of experience of watching my family in the business. You have to bring something else to the table. You have to bring your food to the table and it needs to be done well, and it needs to taste good, but you’ve gotta bring a character also. These days, you’ve gotta back it up. They’re not looking for a chef who hide in the kitchen. They want to put a face with the dining experience in this day and age. That’s the trend. That’s why you see the celebrity chefs now in the past 10 to 15 years. Chefs never used to get recognized or never used to get credit for any of their work. Now, people say we’re the new rock stars.

Did you guys get to see any of Chicago while you were there or were you just cooped up in the competition?

You’re pretty much cooped up. I’ve been to Chicago before. I think it’s an amazing place to host “Top Chef” No. 4. When I heard about it, I was really excited. It’s like the New York food scene, but it’s much more laid back and not as cutthroat. It’s nice.

How often do you get back to the Bay area?

Oh, man, I try to get there as often as possible. My grandmother still lives on the beach and I still have a little place on the beach there, too.

The reason I ask is … obviously we’re not Chicago, we’re not Miami, we’re not San Francisco, we’re not New York. What’s your sense of how the scene is developing here from a culinary standpoint?

I haven’t been to the Tampa Bay area for a little while, but I’d have to admit the scene is developing … slowly. But I think it’s going to get there.

Right.

You first started to see the change with The Cheesecake Factory. Bern’s has always been there. I’d have to say SideBern’s is more of what I’d like to see Tampa develop. I think you have a Maggiano’s there now.

Right.

You don’t have that many chef-driven restaurants. You have corporate chef-driven restaurants.

There are people like Chris Ponte and Jeannie Pierola.

Right. There are a few like them. You have the Hawaiian chef…

Roy Yamaguchi.

Right. And you have the steakhouses. But Floridian palates and style of eating are completely different as compared to, say, New York City. In the city, it would be hard to get them to jump on the wagon with us, you know what I mean?