Laila Ghambari is many things. She is the owner of Portland’s Guilder Coffee, a coffee consultant, and one of the most sought-after educators in specialty coffee. Though she is perhaps best known as the 2014 US Barista Champion. And to this already lengthy resume, she has added yet another accolade: game show contestant. Last night, Ghambari appeared on season six of Fox’s The Floor.
If you’ve never seen The Floor, the format is as follows: “Contestants must stand their ground on a massive, interactive LED game floor of squares, each representing a different trivia category. The first challenger, selected at random, must choose one of his or her neighboring opponents to go head-to-head in an epic quiz duel in the opponent’s category. The winner takes over the loser’s square, gaining valuable ground as they expand their territory, while the loser exits the game. The winner must then choose whether to go on the offensive to dominate more of the board or let The Floor choose a new challenger. The contestant who gains full control over The Floor takes home a life-changing grand prize.”
Originally a Dutch game show, the American version is hosted by Tommy Boy’s Rob Lowe and pits 100 competitors against one another in hopes of winning the $250,000 cash prize. Season six is a tournament of champions, though not any that have ever appeared on The Floor before. These 100 people are champions in a variety of other disciplines including everything from air guitar to pottery, chessboxing to puppeteering, even mushrooming. And a US Barista Champion.
So good luck to anyone foolish enough to challenge Ghambari to a coffee trivia quiz.
We won’t spoil how much, if any, airtime Ghambari got in episode one or how she fared. It’s available on Hulu right now if you want to go watch it for yourself.
But Ghambari’s appearance on The Floor did remind us of something: she is, in fact, the second barista champion to compete in a reality game show this year. The first being, of course, Top Chef competitor and barista champion Duyen Ha.
It was the seminal moment of Season 23, in Episode 10 when Chef Ha offered as corroborating evidence for her competitive nature that she was a barista champion. Here’s the clip in case you don’t remember.
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And if you think this was said with the same level of seriousness as a first-grade jump rope championship, then I would simply ask which one of the two accolades was important enough to make it to her Top Chef bio.
It took us a while to track down which Barista Championship Chef Ha was referring to, but it wasn’t until an episode of Maximum Fun’s TV Chef Fantasy League podcast came out that the mystery was solved. It was, according to someone who worked with Ha at NYC’s Think Coffee, “a [company-wide] barista competition… [with] 40 people minimum competing in this event.” It was honestly, we assume, a heroic performance, and it led to the creation of The Barista Championship Database, our user-driven compendium of coffee competition wins. Make sure you register (for free!) all your throwdown, triangulation, sprodeos and other coffee competition successes so that you too may be honored as the rightful champion you are.
As Chef Ha herself stated to us on Instagram, “Just because I’m too busy doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” So true.
All this to say, two great barista champions gracing our airwaves in the same calendar year is cause for celebration. One, Laila Ghambari, came through a stacked Big Western circuit to beat out future USBC champions Charles Babinski and Cole McBride for the national title. The other, barista champion Duyen Ha, won a Sunday Night Sprodown at Think Coffee at some point in the late aughts, we think. Congrats to both these incredible champions.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
