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, La.
“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, Cattivella, in Denver’s Central Park neighborhood. She’s been serving Italian recipes there since 2017, inspired by the nuances of Italian culture.
