Denver chef Elise Wiggins is in the business of making people happy. Now, she’s on track to take that passion national with a new cooking show.
“Hands down all day long, my addiction is when food leaves the counter and goes to the guests. I watch them, because I know how they're going to react,” Wiggins said. “When they take their first bite and they look at the person they're dining with and they're like, ‘oh my God’, and their eyes are rolling back – that's my drug.”
Wiggins has known she wanted to cook for people since she made her first batch of chocolate chip cookies as a young girl in West Monroe, Louisiana.
“The whole family was like ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs' and it clicked for me. I was like, ‘You make good food, you can make a lot of people happy,’ and that's what I want to do,” she said. “It has been my quest ever since.”
After more than 30 years in the industry, Wiggins opened her own restaurant, Cativella, in Denver’s Central Park neighborhood. She’s been serving Italian recipes there since 2017, inspired by the nuances of Italian culture.
“They're very passionate people, so there's a story behind everything. The tortellini? That's Venus' navel. Pene pasta? It's an ink quill. Everything has a story behind it, and it makes dining and eating that much more interesting,” she said.
The name of her restaurant, which means “naughty girl” in Italian, has a story behind it, too. She loves nothing more than taking a dish that’s centuries old and giving it a modern tweak.
“The name came up because I was playing jokes with the chef I was studying with and he called me Cativella and I was like, ‘I love it,’” she said. “I like to kind of break the rules a little bit.”
Wiggins brings decades of experience to the restaurant including 12 years as the Executive Chef for Panzano. She’s also a passionate teacher, offering cooking lessons at her restaurant and annual educational food adventures through the Italian countryside.
She takes the chemistry behind what makes food taste good and works it into her classes.
An example of this is how she teaches people to make a traditional bolognese sauce. You may add carrots to this Italian staple because that’s the way you were taught. But Wiggins wants her students, and future viewers, to understand why those techniques have lasted centuries.
“We put carrot into the bolognese sauce because there's natural sugars in there – not to make your sauce sweet, but if your tomatoes are acidic, that natural sugar negates the acid,” Wiggins explained. “When you break something simple like that down for people, then they're like, ‘Ah, now I get it.’”
That approach is what caught the attention of Eat This TV back in January. The lifestyle network distributes cooking shows across nearly 67 million U.S. households through media platforms like Apple TV+, Amazon, Roku and YouTube and were looking for a new chef to step in front of the camera.
“They reached out and they were like, ‘We think you'd be perfect. We'd like you to come and film a pilot in New York,’” Wiggins said.
After filming, she learned she got the gig over several other competing chefs from around the country. “They put the pilot up on YouTube for a couple of weeks and said my viewership was off the charts.”
The production crew arrives in Denver on March 16 to film 12 episodes of the in-the-works show ‘Cativella Kitchen with Chef Elise Wiggins.’ Then, they’ll get to work editing for a spring release date.
“This is kind of a dream for any chef,” she said.
This isn’t the first time Wiggins has cooked for an audience. She previously hosted a Colorado PBS Show in 2019 called Roots to Ranches.
“Sadly, the pandemic hit and the negotiations stopped in October of that year because there was a huge sponsor that pulled out of all these shows,” she recalled
But now, Wiggins has her chance to shine once again. This time on a national stage, she’ll aim to cast some light on the Mile High City while she’s at it.
“I'm super excited. I am not from here, but I love it. I'm kind of a born again Coloradan,” Wiggins said. “Everybody kept saying, ‘oh, Denver's still a cow town,’ but the talent has been here for a long time and now, it’s finally getting recognition.”
Wiggins is happy to be a part of a new wave of chefs and restaurants helping to make Denver a culinary destination.
You can watch her work and learn the history behind some very special dishes in late April or early May across your devices.
