Spilled Ink

Life Is Short

Top Chef contestant and Crave founder Robin Leventhal talks about her tattoo and the battle that led to it.

Photos by Sunny Facer

As the founder and executive chef of the late, hip Capitol Hill restaurant Crave, and as a former teacher at culinary academies from Vermont to SeaTac, Seattle’s Robin Leventhal built enough credibility to be invited to compete on the latest season of Bravo’s Top Chef. For some of those “cheftestants,” the show was the greatest challenge of their lives, but for Leventhal, who placed sixth out of seventeen, it has competition. A cancer survivor, Leventhal attests that the gauntlet of kitchen tests was a challenge “equal to that of chemo.”

In person, Leventhal is boisterous and easily as trendy as any of the menus she has crafted. Beneath her spiky red hair, her lone tattoo rests at the base of her neck, centered directly over her spine. It’s a spiral cross-section of a shell whose design and placement pay tribute to nature’s use of pattern and symmetry. Leventhal’s fascination with such patterns developed while she was a ceramics major at Bates College in Maine and then pursued a masters in fine arts from the University of Michigan.

The forty-three-year-old stumbled across the design about fifteen years ago in a ceramics museum in Lima, Peru, while skimming through a book of Incan art in the gift shop. At the time, she was captivated by the design, but it would be more than ten years before it actually appeared on her body. “I had wanted a tattoo for a long time, but never wanted to make my mom upset,” she laughs. “So instead I just got a lot of piercings she couldn’t see.”

Leventhal’s life changed in October of 2004 when she was diagnosed with two extremely destructive forms of lymphoma. It was then that she decided there was no sense in holding back, and after completing an intense round of chemotherapy to combat the cancer, she made the decision to mark her victory with the tattoo, created by Collin Delgado. “I appreciated life before,” she says, “but I recognized how short life is from that experience.”

Leventhal has plans to get more tattoos in the future, specifically on her feet to pay homage to their “grounding” qualities. As for commemorating her time on Top Chef, she says, “I think being a chef is a magical thing and I definitely want to do something food related, something about style and spice. But something specifically about the show might just be too vain for me.” •