14 Favorite Snacks of Celebrity Chefs

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

For many foodies, there’s nothing better than chilling on the sofa with some snacks and watching celebrity chefs on the latest cooking shows demonstrate how to create fun dishes or battle it out in cooking competitions. But have you ever wondered what those chefs are snacking on when they’re in the same position as you? When culinary stars crave a tasty treat or a quick bite, do they turn to their arsenal of top-notch ingredients and artfully prepare a gourmet creation, or do they go for something a little more pedestrian? The truth might surprise you.

As it turns out, even world-class chefs reach for comfort food when snack cravings hit. From humble chips to cheesy dips and childhood favorites, their go-to bites are often surprisingly approachable. A few choices might raise an eyebrow, like a certain chef’s penchant for pickled herring before bed, but many of the snacks are pretty low-key, which is a good reminder that even the most brilliant culinary minds don’t always crave caviar. Here’s a look at 14 celebrity chefs’ favorite snacks that they reach for when no one’s asking them for a tasting menu.

Kwame Onwuachi hit television screens in 2015 when he was a contestant on Season 13 of “Top Chef”. Since then, he’s opened several restaurants, earned a James Beard Award, and published a critically acclaimed memoir titled “Notes From a Young Black Chef.” He’s best known for his creative twists on Afro-Caribbean cuisine, sometimes with Creole touches, but when it comes to the snacks he likes to stock at home, he’s all about a classic candy: Starburst. And not just any Starburst flavor will do. Pink is the only flavor that he likes.

When New York Magazine asked Onwuachi what things he couldn’t live without, the first thing on the list was pink Starburst candies. He told the magazine that he doesn’t know why the company even bothers making any of the other flavors. He said, “They make all-pink packs now so I don’t have to sift through a multipack and get those stupid orange and yellow ones.” In another interview with Good Housekeeping, he also proclaimed his love for pink Starburst and said that watermelon Sour Patch candies are another must-have in his pantry.

If you’re a fan of Martha Stewart, you probably already know that she’s pretty meticulous when it comes to her work and daily routines. Eating healthy is important to her, and she often tries to eat light throughout the day. For example, Stewart’s daily breakfast routine is a glass of green juice made with veggies from her garden and a cappuccino. That’s not to say she doesn’t indulge in a snack every once in a while though. Stewart has several guilty pleasure foods, including one that she indulges in on a nightly basis.

In a 2017 interview with Town & Country, Stewart revealed that she sometimes snacks on a spoonful of organic peanut butter or sneaks slices of American cheese from her housekeeper’s stash. Liverwurst is also a weakness of hers, and she likes to eat it straight out of the tube. But her go-to snack is pickled herring. She told the magazine, “I eat pickled herring as a late-night snack before I go to bed because it’s savory and good.” She didn’t elaborate further, so we don’t know whether she eats it with bread, on crackers, or simply as-is.

Aarón Sánchez was born into a foodie family. His grandmother was a chef and a Mexican cookbook author and his mother owned a Mexican restaurant in New York City. It’s not surprising then that he decided to carry on that legacy and built a career championing Mexican cuisine. Over the years, Sánchez has shared countless recipes for enticing dishes like Mexican tortas, tacos, and mole. But when he wants an easy-going snack at home, he turns to a cheesy classic.

“I think queso fundido is my favorite snack of all time,” Sánchez said in an Instagram post. At first glance, queso fundido looks similar to the queso dip you often find in Tex-Mex restaurants. However, this is no runny bowl of melted Velveeta cheese. Authentic queso fundido is typically made with semi-firm cheese like Chihuahua or Oaxaca cheese and it often includes delicious add-ins. In fact, that’s what Sánchez loves about it. He told Mashed, “What makes it so delicious is the fact that it has multiple layers and it’s versatile.” He recommended adding roasted poblanos, caramelized onions, sautéed mushrooms, or Mexican-style chorizo.

Fans of “Diners, Drive-ins and Dives” would be forgiven for thinking that Guy Fieri ‘s favorite snack is something absolutely over the top like dulce de leche pancake balls or nachos piled high with everything but the kitchen sink. The truth is, he prefers something much more low-key. He told Allrecipes that if he could only eat one snack for the rest of his life, it would be salty pretzels. In fact, it was soft pretzels that sparked his love affair with food and his culinary career.

When Fieri was 10 years old, his family took a trip to Tahoe, and that’s where he tried his first soft pretzel. He told Dan Pashman of the Sporkful podcast about how he watched a pretzel vendor at a ski lodge dip a soft pretzel in salt and add mustard and stated those were the flavors he loved when he was a kid. He said, “So I ate one and … I mean the doughiness and the chewiness. I mean, I’d never seen anything like this.” A year later, Guy was slinging pretzels in his hometown of Ferndale, California, from “The Awesome Pretzel Cart,” which he built with his father.

Follow Padma Lakshmi on social media and you’ll quickly realize that she has a thing for pomegranate seeds. She puts them on everything from salads to yogurt and even pizza. One of her all-time favorite snacks that features often on her Instagram feed is pomegranate toast. In fact, she’s posted about it so often that she even created an Instagram Reel montage defending her fixation on the fruity toast. The caption reads, “You call it an obsession. I call it a lifestyle.”

Lakshmi’s pomegranate toast typically features a thick slice of toasted sourdough bread smeared with creamy peanut butter and sprinkled with pomegranate seeds. However, she also likes to switch it up every once in a while with variations like sourdough toast with goat cheese, pomegranates, dill, and cayenne pepper. She’s also been known to add pomegranate seeds to avocado toast. If you want to create her pom toast at home, there’s an easy pomegranate peeling method that can save you time and mess. Simply cut a square in the top of the fruit, then make shallow slices down the sides so that you can crack the fruit open and release the seeds.

It’s no secret that Stephanie Izard is a fan of Cheez-Its. The James Beard Award-winning chef isn’t shy about proclaiming her love for the snack and she even slips it into dishes at her restaurants. In fact, Izard loves Cheez-Its so much that her wedding cake featured chocolate and strawberry Nesquik flavored cake filled with layers of chocolate covered Cheez-Its, peanut butter, and chocolate ganache. That didn’t go unnoticed by Cheez-Its. In 2021, the company invited Izard to create a cake for its 100th anniversary that it called the Cheez-It Cheez-Itennial Cake.

While Izard has stated that she likes her Cheez-Its simply dipped in ranch dressing, she also loves incorporating them into sweet treats in fun ways. For example, with the Cheez-It anniversary cake, she ground the crackers and mixed them into the flour, then added cheddar cheese to bring out the flavor more. She also told Tasting Table that her absolute favorite thing is chocolate peanut butter covered Cheez-Its. She said, “We melt a little bit of peanut butter, and you stir the Cheez-Its into it. Put some cocoa powder and sugar on the outside, and they taste almost like Butterfingers.”

Like many chefs, Gordon Ramsay’s favorite foods are a spectrum of iconic dishes. His tastes range from beef Wellington to butter chicken, chicken wings, and animal-style Double-Double burgers from In-N-Out. But when he’s looking for something comforting to snack on, he turns to a childhood favorite: baked beans. He stated in a YouTube video, “The first big thing that I remember as a kid was bacon and beans.” It’s a dish that’s wildly popular in his home country of the U.K., and one that Ramsay says is good any time of day.

Fellow baked beans fans might crack open a can of Heinz baked beans in tomato sauce for a snack when the craving hits, but Ramsay prefers to make his own from scratch. In the YouTube video, he outlines how he upgrades beans on toast. He fries up pancetta in a pan, then adds freshly chopped chili, garlic, diced onions, brown sugar, cider vinegar, Worcestershire sauce, and puréed tomatoes. Once the sauce has reduced, he adds haricot beans and lets them absorb all the spices. Instead of serving his beans on toast, he piles them onto potato cakes.

Sunny Anderson looks at food a little bit differently than other chefs do. That’s because when she was 19 years old, she was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis, a chronic inflammatory bowel disease. Because some foods can trigger flare-ups, she’s careful about what she eats. One of Anderson’s go-to snacks is a nutrient-rich choice that’s also sweet and tasty. She told EatingWell, “I like a banana because it’s filling, it’s nutritious, plus it keeps your mouth moist, if you will.” 

Anderson acknowledged that bananas can be boring on their own, which is why she likes to mix things up. For example, her PB&J frozen bananas feature a sweet, hardened peanut butter and jelly coating. Anderson has also played around with bananas foster, taking the classic dessert and turning it into a shake and a breakfast casserole. In addition, she’s tried her hand at a banana fool, which is a style of a dessert made by folding fruit into custard. In her version, she dusts the bananas with sugar and puts them under the broiler before folding them into the custard to give them a brûlée flavor.

When you look at Bobby Flay’s restaurants, it’s clear that he has diverse tastes ranging from burgers to Italian food and grilled steaks. But what many people might not know is that he has a weak spot for ice cream and gelato. In an Instagram post, he said, “I eat ice cream and gelato like it’s my last meal.” On an episode of his podcast “Always Hungry With Bobby Flay and Sophie Flay,” he stated that pistachio was his favorite flavor, followed by hazelnut and a chocolate hazelnut blend.

Flay’s first job was at Baskin-Robbins, so that may be where he developed his passion for ice cream. On the podcast, he said, “I was scooping ice cream at Basket Robbins around the corner for my house … in New York City, and I was like in heaven.” He described how he would make banana splits with different flavors of ice cream and sauces, as well as a colossal creation called the Matterhorn that featured seven scoops of ice cream and seven sauces. He also commented on how fun it would be to own an ice cream or gelato shop with a coffee bar.

Boston-based chef Tiffani Faison is another culinary star that’s hard to pigeonhole into just one style of cooking. Among the many restaurants she helms there is a pizzeria, a Texas-style barbecue joint, and a seafood spot. But when it comes to snacking, there’s one treat that she always turns to and that’s Haribo gummy candies. She told Boston Magazine, “I know it’s bad for me, but this is my lifelong addiction. I grew up with them in Germany.”

If Faison has the choice, she always opts for Haribo gummies from Europe because she believes they just taste better. Her go-tos are Haribo Gummi Bears, Roulettes, Happy Colas, Twin Cherries, and Red & Black Raspberries. She’s also not adverse to salty snacks. In a YouTube video where the team from Le Creuset asked her what her guilty pleasure food was, she listed gummy bears first, followed by hot dogs, nachos, and Cheetos. A self-proclaimed junk food fanatic, she has no qualms about her favorite snacks. “I don’t have guilt around things I should have guilt around,” she said. 

Few chefs have had the opportunity to try as many international dishes as Andrew Zimmern. The James Beard Award-winning chef and former “Bizarre Foods” host has sampled tasty eats in places as widespread as Tokyo, Mexico City, Paris, and Alexandria. With that in mind, you might think that his idea of a tasty snack would be something foreign that he fell in love with during his travels. However, Zimmern’s favorite midnight snack is a simple pleasure: grilled toast with butter and anchovies.

While anchovies may not be to everyone’s taste, Zimmern’s snack hits a lot of notes that can get the synapses firing. You get earthiness from the toast, rich dairy goodness from the butter, and a wallop of umami flavor from the anchovies. And Zimmern doesn’t use just any anchovies. In a TikTok video, he explained that tinned anchovies are fine when he wants to add a salty blast to soups or stews, but for everything else he uses quality jarred Nettuno anchovies that are packed whole in salt. He said he soaks them for about 90 minutes, then peels the filet off, and they’re good to go.

If you ever watched Adam Richman scarf down mammoth sized meals on “Man v. Food” back in the day, it might be hard to imagine him eating anything snack-sized. But just like the rest of us, he often craves something quick and easy that doesn’t necessitate a nap afterward. For Richman, peanut butter is the perfect solution. He’s a big fan of creamy peanut butter, so much so that he doesn’t even need to put it on anything — one of his guilty pleasures is eating peanut butter straight out of the jar.

While Richman may be something of a peanut butter purist, he’s not opposed to a classic PB&J sandwich. However, he’s particular about certain components. He told Maxim magazine, “Bread is the most overlooked part of the sandwich. It’s more than just the thing that delivers crap to your face. It should have flavor and texture and character.” He said he prefers a nutty wheat bread that’s toasted or warm. In addition, he prefers seeded raspberry jam with creamy peanut butter and strawberry, raspberry, or blackberry jam with chunky peanut butter.

How relatable is it to reach for some instant ramen noodles when you’re hungry but don’t have the time or inclination to cook a full-on meal? In a YouTube video posted by the Food Network, Judy Joo admitted that she loves instant noodles late at night. Like many of us, she’s aware that they’re not the healthiest of snacks, but that’s not really the point, is it? She said, “I don’t care if they’re bad for me and full of — I don’t know — 10,000 grams of sodium. Totally a guilty pleasure.”

Being the innovative chef that she is, Joo has plenty of tricks up her sleeve to upgrade instant ramen noodles. For example, sometimes she swaps out the packet of seasoning for a wholesome stock and adds extra ingredients like fresh veggies, prawns, meat, or a fried egg. Sauces and condiments like gochujang and soya bean paste can add depth and complexity. One of her favorite combos is instant ramen noodles with dduk bokki, a popular Korean street food that consists of rice cakes cooked in a sweet and spicy sauce. 

Alton Brown might be known for his scientific approach to cooking, but when it comes to snacking, he keeps it classic. Among Brown’s favorite foods, one of the simplest is also the most snackable: potato chips. He also likes to pair his chips with a cheeky drink. In a Facebook post he said, “Okay, I’m not going to lie. My favorite comfort foods are kettle-style potato chips and martinis with olives because it’s important to get your greens. And yes, that’s gin, not vodka. I’m not a savage.”

Brown didn’t specify whether he has a favorite brand of kettle-style potato chips, but if we had to guess, we’d say he likely makes his own chips. He’s shared a few recipes for potato chips over the years, the easiest of which simply involves slicing the potatoes with a mandolin and frying the slices in non-virgin olive oil. He also has a stellar method for making barbecue potato chips where he smokes the potatoes first, then fries them in oil and sprinkles them with a homemade spice mix that includes smoked paprika, brown sugar, onion powder, garlic powder, salt, and chili powder.