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"Stephanie Izard has always had a winning attitude \u2013 you saw her graciously accept (with genuine surprise) her win last season \u2013 even after the ricotta pound cake she still claims to have nightmares about. I recently sat down for lunch with fan-favorite Stephanie to find out what she&amp;#039;s got planned for the future, and after her big win, she&amp;#039;s got big plans. What do we have to look forward to? First, a brand new restaurant that she hopes to open next summer in Chicago. Details recently leaked about the new venture, called The Drunken Goat. She&amp;#039;ll work with partners Rob Katz and Kevin Boehm (the duo behind Chicago&amp;#039;s Boka, Landmark and Perennial) on what she says will be &amp;quot;Spanish and Italian\u2013influenced small plates.&amp;quot; Of course, that&amp;#039;s not all! She&amp;#039;s also working with an agent to sell her new cookbook. &amp;quot;I think when I realized that my place in this industry and world of chefs will be to sort of be a cross between a chef&amp;#039;s-chef and a home cook&amp;#039;s chef,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;I do a lot of things that are really easy to do at home, it just may be things that people don&amp;#039;t think are easy. I also hope that they&amp;#039;re respectable in the sense that they&amp;#039;re a little creative. I don&amp;#039;t pull out weird gadgets, everything is totally doable at home.&amp;quot; According to her, the book&amp;#039;s purpose is, &amp;quot;how to think, shop, and cook like a chef.&amp;quot; How does a chef think? &amp;quot;People always ask me, how do you come up with all of these ideas, and I just tell them I think in food. I can just taste things in my mouth, which I think that&amp;#039;s just how chefs&amp;#039; mouths work,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I want to get people to realize that they can change some ingredients around in a recipe, and understand the reason that we&amp;#039;re putting olives and blackberries and this and that into a dish is to balance the saltiness and the sweetness and the savory, for example.&amp;quot; Divided into seasons, the book will include shopping suggestions and wine and beer parings for recipes, too. The spotlight is still tough -- she admits her family follows the blogs closer than she does. &amp;quot;I guess there were pictures on the blogs during filming of all of us at Whole Foods,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;My sister apparently freaked out and thought I got kicked off because she never saw me in any of the shots.&amp;quot; And even though Season 4 has long since ended, the coverage continued. &amp;quot;My dad reads the blogs sometimes and said to me recently, &amp;#039;I heard you were hanging out at some bar... something pig?&amp;#039; and I was like, &amp;#039;Yeah, dad, The Spotted Pig.&amp;#039;&amp;quot; For now, she&amp;#039;s focusing on using her success on Top Chef to further her goals.&amp;quot;I wake up in a new city every day with something weird going on,&amp;quot; she said, referencing a small sampling of the festivals, appearances, and events that keep her busy. &amp;quot;I just want to take it as far as possible. I don&amp;#039;t think that any of the other winners have taken it as far as it possibly could go. I want to be the best I can. I tend to be very hard on myself, which I think most driven people tend to be, so I&amp;#039;v always had pretty lofty goals. I guess winning has just made them loftier.&amp;quot; Curious what she thinks about this season? Check out her weekly blog on bravotv.com. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.delish.com/restaurants/a23616/stephanie-izard/>