This is a message for Gene Villiatora's first boss, the guy at the California Hotel in Las Vegas who once called him "a worthless dishwasher":

Villiatora's on Bravo's "Top Chef: New York," and you're not.

Villiatora, who grew up in Whitmore Village but now lives in Vegas, is one of 17 chefs competing for $100,000 on the fifth season of cable's top food show. The Leilehua graduate is out to prove that hard work can trump first impressions and win seed money to open his own restaurant.

The new season, set in New York this time, kicked off Nov. 12. Episodes were taped last summer. Villiatora was one of 1,500 people from Vegas alone who tried out for the show last spring. So far, he has survived the first two episodes.

Unlike most of the contestants, Villiatora, 33, has no formal culinary training.

"That made me label myself as an underdog," he said by telephone from Vegas. "It was overwhelming how many people went to culinary school, and it made me kind of nervous. But I had confidence in myself and what I have known through the years."

Villiatora left for Vegas with his family shortly after graduating from high school in 1993. His cooking skills were homespun but lean.

"When I was growing up, I watched my grandmother and my mom and my uncles," he said. "And I cooked around the house. Just dinner. When I moved to Vegas is when I realized I wanted to pursue a career in cooking."

It took a year of dirty dishes — and his boss's insult — before that happened.

"So without my boss knowing, I started giving the line cooks a break, and one day, I gave him a break and showed him how I cooked," Villiatora said.

The young chef went on to work at various small restaurants in the Vegas area, learning to cook Italian and "basic French." He worked at a sushi bar in a Japanese restaurant. And he read as much as he could about cooking.

He wound up working as a sous chef at Roy's in Vegas for five years, which explains his love of Pacific Rim and Hawaiian fusion dishes. Married and a father of three young children, Villiatora left Roy's earlier this year to work as a food consultant, and recently created a Pacific Rim menu for a new Disney restaurant.

He would like to open his own restaurant in Hawai'i.

Each episode of "Top Chef" features two challenges for contestants. The first is a quick test of basic abilities, and the second is a more elaborate elimination event that is designed to test cooking creativity.

Villiatora said the very first test caught everyone by surprise: The chefs had to peel 15 apples with a paring knife instead of an apple peeler.

"The majority of our chefs would probably agree that it was several years since we peeled one with a knife," he said. "I was unprepared. I didn't have a paring knife."

For the second test, Villiatora had to create an Indian dish. It was his first attempt at Indian food, but he wound up shopping at a grocery store that served some. After smelling and tasting some of the dishes, he used his $75 budget to buy what he needed to create masala-rubbed New Zealand lamb chops with basmati rice, macadamia nut tzatziki and a sauce made of miso and curry emulsion.

The show's three judges loved it, saying that he had actually re-created classic Indian cooking.

"I just improvised," Villiatora said. "I went with flavor profiling, and I did what I thought would taste good. Lucky for me, I hit it on the doorknob."

On the second episode, contestants had to create their own signature hotdog.

Villiatora thought outside the bun. "Being that I had experience in sushi, I tried to make it look like a sushi roll," he said. It didn't earn him high marks, but it didn't send him to the bottom, either, he said.

It isn't his perfect hotdog, though.

"I could stick a grilled Redondo's hotdog in a bun, and that would be fine for me," he said. "I just put ketchup on it. But if there are no condiments around, I am willing to eat a Redondo's hotdog by itself."