Twenty-six chefs competed at Paddock Springs, 2695 Shelden St., Warsaw, during the third Culinary Olympics Thursday, with the gold medalists being from Kendallville.
Raquel Kline, director of sales and admissions with Paddock Springs, said Paddock Springs’ parent company Trilogy Health Services started the Culinary Olympics to be a competition to showcase what Trilogy’s chefs have to offer.
Trilogy has 130 campuses across the Midwest.

    Pictured are silver medalists Michayla Payton and Brandy Peek from Blair Ridge Health Campus, Peru, Ind. Photo Provided.
  

“So we’re broken into a few different divisions. So each division competes,” Kline said. Thursday’s event was teams from 13 different campuses across northern Indiana.
The event starts with a knife pull, where teams pull a knife to choose one of 13 timeslots of when the chefs cook. A team of two chefs from each campus then get to make a dish from a Paddock Springs pantry, similar to what people see on “Master Chef” or “Chopped.” The team has one hour to prepare a dish and present it to a panel of four community judges and three residential judges. The dishes are judged on creativity, presentation and taste, she said.
Winners were announced and the chefs who won gold will go on to compete “for gold, silver and bronze for our entire company” in April, she said.
Thursday, the chefs that won gold were Heaven Clark and Daryl Sheley, from Orchard Pointe Health Campus, Kendallville; silver, Michayla Payton and Brandy Peek, from Blair Ridge Health Campus, Peru, Ind; and the bronze medal went to Brittany Sudlow and Greg Abell, from The Residence at Waterford Crossing, Goshen.

    Pictured are bronze medalists Brittany Sudlow and Greg Abell from The Residence at Waterford Crossing, Goshen. Photo Provided.
  

The whole reason Trilogy Health Services does the competition is to showcase what Trilogy residents are getting every day.
“These are chefs that have gone to culinary school. We have put them through culinary school and things like that,” Kline said.
Residents that weren’t judges were able to watch the chefs prepare their food and compete, so “they can come out and enjoy the whole thing.” Kline said the residents at Paddock Springs really love the event and watching chefs prepare.
“They always ask us when this event is coming up because we do have to take over their dining room, so we always want to make sure it’s OK with them. And they absolutely love it. They love being apart of it. Our chefs love it because this is one day a year we really get to sit down and celebrate them. So they just get to come have fun and see all the other chefs in the division,” Kline said.