If you had asked the typical Pasadenans who have frequented the Huntington Hotel dining room at any point in the last 100 years if the hotel’s chef would someday be a tattooed, bad-boy national TV star who makes things like lemongrass-scallion froth, they would have popped you on the head with their Wall Street Journals. But that’s in fact exactly what’s happened, and now the Langham Huntington’s chef, Michael Voltaggio, is the winner of the latest Top Chef competition and the subject of massive amounts of national blog gossip and chatter. We’re not sure what Pasadena native Julia Child would have thought of this development, but we know the Langham’s management must be overjoyed with the publicity and the increase in business at the Dining Room.

Here’s our most recent piece on the Dining Room at the Huntington from our sister site, Hometown-Pasadena.com.