Gerry Garvin

G. Garvin, host of TV One's original series Turn Up the Heat with G. Garvin, is also the executive chef and co-owner of a L.A. restaurant, which in less than a year earned top honors from both the Los Angeles Times and Los Angeles magazine. Growing up in Atlanta with four sisters and a single mother, eating meant putting food on the table. By age 13, he'd traded after-school football practice for a job at Atlanta's haute Vining's Inn, where he soaped dishes and soaked up the inner workings of a four-star operation. Two years later, Garvin landed at the Ritz-Carlton. As the youngest cook in the downtown Atlanta hotel, he held summer and extracurricular positions there until he turned 18. "There are no limits to what you can get," Garvin explains, "But you have to forge it for yourself." Throughout the 1990's, Garvin pushed those limits as executive chef at Morton's in West Hollywood, Kassbah in West Hollywood, and sous chef at Ritz-Carlton Palm Springs at the tender age of 23.