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Ilan D. Hall is an American chef, television personality, and restaurateur. He won the second season of Top Chef, and is owner-chef of Ramen Hood in Los Angeles.[1]
Hall is a native of Great Neck, New York. His parents were both immigrants: his father from Glasgow, Scotland, and his mother from Israel. Both his parents were from Jewish families.[2][3]
As a teenager, Hall worked at Marine Fishery, a seafood store in his hometown of Great Neck[4] and was later trained at Italy's Lorenzo de' Medici Apicus Program,[5][6] and at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA).[7]
In 2007, Hall won season two of Top Chef. Ilan was a line cook at Casa Mono, a Spanish restaurant in Manhattan. He had a rivalry with Marcel Vigneron during the show, with whom he attended culinary school simultaneously.[8] Bravo ranked "The Head Shaving Incident" involving Hall and Vigneron as "probably the biggest scandal in Top Chef history."[9]
In August 2009, he opened his first restaurant, The Gorbals, in downtown Los Angeles.[10] Less than a week after opening, The county health department shut down The Gorbals because of an inadequate water heater.[11] It reopened on October 23, 2009, but then permanently closed in 2014.[12][13]
In 2014, Hall opened a second iteration of The Gorbals restaurant in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.[14][15] He redesigned the menu with an Israeli barbecue concept in 2015 and renamed the restaurant ESH, the Hebrew word for fire.[16] ESH closed in September 2016.
Hall opened Ramen Hood in Los Angeles at Grand Central Market in 2015.[1]
Hall hosted Knife Fight, a cooking competition show on the Esquire Network for four seasons.[17][18] The show ended in 2017 when NBCUniversal announced it was shutting down the Esquire Network cable channel.[19]
