Q&A with Cunningham Restaurant Group chef and World Food Champion Collin Hilton
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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowCunningham Restaurant Group Chef de Cuisine Collin Hilton tasted victory in his hometown of Indianapolis when he won the noodle category at the World Food Championships at the Indiana State Fairgrounds last fall.
The 2024 competition featured more than 300 teams, 1,200 chefs and competitors from more than 35 states and 30 participating countries.
Last month, Hilton traveled to Arkansas to compete in The Final Table competition, where he was crowned World Food Champion and got a $150,000 prize. Hilton’s winning dish consisted of spring pea cappellacci in chicken broth with recado negro, sugar snap peas, cashew salsa macha and Meyer lemon.
Inside INdiana Business visited CRG’s test kitchen, where Hilton was preparing for an upcoming event, to talk about his culinary journey and victory on a global stage.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
What is your role as chef de cuisine?
I work with the corporate culinary team, helping and overseeing menu development and menu change of both our new concepts that we come up with and current restaurants.
I’m involved in all aspects of menu at CRG, so if you go to any restaurant, there’s going to be a dish or some sort of influence that I have. On a day-to-day basis, I get to cook some stuff, get to taste a lot of great food and go into the restaurants.
Our most recent concept that we opened, Shin Dig, was me primarily writing that menu and those recipes. I actually did the little doodle on the pizza boxes. I made some less obvious pizzas and wings, and the team there has since grabbed it and ran with it. By no means do I get to take the credit for how awesome a restaurant that is, but I was definitely involved in that. Outside of that, I get to cook for a lot of private events. We have a greenhouse about a mile south of Monument Circle where we do five or six course wine dinners that I tend to host.
Was this your first World Food Championships? How did you prepare?
This was our first World Food Championship and the noodle category was what was open. In terms of preparing, it’s always challenging trying to come up with what’s going to be a winning dish. It’s one thing when you’re in a restaurant setting where you’re trying to make good dishes and trying to fill different categories of what each diner might like. Being in a test kitchen, we have the luxury of testing things out. Once we kind of had a vision, we wrote a recipe and a game plan.
What was The Final Table like?
In the final round, the parameters were “your current culinary journey,” and we were asked to cook something that you feel represents some aspect of where you’ve come from and where you are now. We did pasta just because that’s kind of where we’re at right now. I historically hadn’t done a ton of pasta, but because I won the noodle category, I’ve been leaning into it a lot more.
It was challenging in different ways and very emotional. You’re competing against other people that are working just as hard as you. You become their friend because they’re literally right next to you and while you’re only cooking in an hour segment, you’re spending all day with them and their team and you see they’re just as stressed.
Getting up there on front row and having it announced was a huge relief, just to see the culmination of all that hard work.
Why do you cook?
It’s something I ask myself often because it’s challenging. We have to eat. I was attracted to it initially because it felt real. I didn’t want to sit behind the computer and I didn’t want everything to be theoretical. I need something I can physically touch, smell, taste and do, and so cooking kind of answered that for me. I was also attracted to the community that’s built around it; it’s like one of the few things that 100% bring us all together. Whether we want to be together or not, we all need to eat and so what a cool avenue to base your career off of where you can kind of be part of the catalyst that brings people together.
The Indiana State Fairgrounds will host the 2025 World Food Championships, billed as the “world’s largest food sport competition,” Oct. 16-19. Last fall, World Food Championships CEO Mike Eaton told IBJ that he envisioned Indianapolis as a long-term home for the event.