Much has been said about the way Houston was snubbed for the Top Chef Texas season that got under way on Bravo last week. The $400,000 carrot offered to the network by the state of Texas has been thoroughly chewed over and spat out, as has the $200,000 forked out by San Antonio's Convention and Visitors Bureau to land substantial filming there.

Houston's Convention and Visitors Bureau declined a similar pay-for-play deal not out of moral purity, but because they wanted to control the content. Which leaves our Texas tax money subsidizing shoots in San Antonio, Austin and Dallas, but not in the state's biggest city and the one with the most dynamic restaurant scene.

The whole grubby business leaves a sour taste that even the presence among the hopefuls of Paul Qui can't quite erase. (He's a graduate of Robert E. Lee High School and University of Houston who has won glory in Austin as the executive chef at Tyson Cole's Uchiko.)

But there's a hidden sweet note for Houstonians. One of the 29 contestants to earn a chef's coat on the premiere episode - which guarantees a spot as one of 16 finalists who'll ride out the season - was Chicago chef Sarah Grueneberg, a product of Dulles High School, out where Stafford meets Sugar Land. The show airs at 9 p.m. Wednesdays on Bravo.

Actually Grueneberg was so motivated to start her cooking career that she earned her G.E.D. and left Dulles early to enroll in the Art Institute of Houston's culinary program.

"That's probably not my mother's favorite thing that I ever did," noted Grueneberg dryly, when I spoke with her by phone this week.

Her decision turned out pretty well. At the relatively tender age of 30, she is executive chef of Spiaggia, the highly ranked Chicago Italian restaurant where such stars as Tony Mantuano, Paul Bartolotta and Missy Robbins have run the kitchen. She was tapped for the job when Robbins left in 2008 to head up A Voce in New York.

It's a big leap from her first job cooking on the line at Brennan's Houston. Chris Shepherd, the former Catalan chef who will open the new Underbelly soon, recruited Grueneberg on one of his visits to the Art Institute, which is his alma mater. Shepherd was running Brennan's wine program at the time, and Randy Evans, another graduate of the Art Institute, was in charge of the kitchen.

Evans signed off on Shepherd's Grueneberg hire with a running joke the two men shared: "If she doesn't work out, she's your problem."

She worked out. For the next four years, Grueneberg moved up the Brennan's ranks. At 22, she was Brennan's sous chef, driving out to local farms with Shepherd and Evans and soaking up everything she could. She absorbed Evans' "strict," disciplined kitchen style and Shepherd's looser creative mode.

"Go into the cooler and let the vegetables talk to you," Shepherd told her one day when she was trying to work out a special. "I use that approach still," Grueneberg said, laughing a little and sounding serious and fond at once. Shepherd steered her into the wine world, too, urging her to take her first level sommelier's exam.

When Shepherd was getting ready to leave Brennan's to run the kitchen at Catalan, Grueneberg struck out for Chicago.

"I didn't want to get stuck," she said. "I wanted to improve my knowledge base" in "one of the country's really high-end dining cities."

She took a step down to work the line at Spiaggia, then worked her way up the ladder, just as she had at Brennan's.

Cooking Italian came as a culture shock after the many-layered style of Brennan's.

"I was used to the multiple flavors of Creole cooking," recalled Grueneberg. "But with Italian, it's two or three ingredients, and that's it."

Grueneberg became Spiaggia's purchasing sous chef, a position that, she points out, "teaches you how to run a restaurant, how to factor costs."

When executive chef Missy Robbins asked her to go for a walk one day three years ago, Grueneberg thought she was in trouble. It turned out Robbins was leaving for New York - and recommending Grueneberg for the top job.

Spiaggia packed her off to Italy for two weeks of intensive cooking and eating, and the rest is history. Grueneberg still returns to Houston regularly: Her mother and her aunt live here, and her grandparents are down in Victoria. She craves Houston's Vietnamese food ("It's the best in the country") and gets in her necessary quota of Tex-Mex.

She hangs out with her old mentor Shepherd, too, haunting the Bellaire Chinatown joints he loves and even, last year, joining him as guest chef for a special-event dinner at his then-restaurant, Catalan.

She's coming back to cook at another dinner when Shepherd gets Underbelly open, Grueneberg said. And she'll be joining Shepherd next month on one of the city's "Where the chefs eat" culinary tours that have been such a hit for the Convention and Visitors Bureau.

Houston won't have a presence in Top Chef Texas other than the commercials filmed by that same Convention and Visitors Bureau. Nevertheless, insisted Grueneberg, "I'm going to represent Houston as best I can" on the show.

With her ebullient screen presence, she'll be easy to root for. And with Uchiko's Paul Qui, who earned his chef's coat and finalist slot in this week's second episode and has many local fans, there will be two Houston expats in the mix.

Let the shenanigans begin.

features@chron.com