Good sport: MasterChef Junior’s Avery Kyle

Everything you’ve read about Avery Kyle, Baton Rouge’s 9-year-old MasterChef Junior star, is true.

Yes, she is just as amazing of a chef as the show made her out to be. (Jesse Romero, the Baton Rougean who competed last year on MasterChef, even asked her to cook on his team for last month’s Roux Rally gumbo cook-off.)

Yes, she’s just as well-spoken as she appears on TV. Each of the 225 writers who interviewed Avery said the same thing: They worried they wouldn’t be able to get good quotes out of a fourth grader. She proved them wrong every time.

225 contributing writer Amanda Capritto, who conducted weekly interviews with Avery during her MasterChef Junior run, texted me after her first interview with the young chef.

“That was the most articulate 9-year-old I’ve ever met,” Capritto wrote. “And she knows how to make rosemary lamb chops, so +100 points for her.”

But there’s one more thing about her you might not know: She’s probably more mature than many people three or even four times her age.

After following Avery’s journey all season, a group of us from 225 attended the final two viewing parties of MasterChef Junior. Mellow Mushroom was standing-room-only, with a crowd so loud we had to strain to hear Gordon Ramsay’s critiques.

It was like watching a football game at a bar. Every time Avery did well, the crowd cheered. There was such an awesome feeling of camaraderie in the room. Every person there, whether age 5 or 65, wanted the same thing: for Avery to win.

I’m not sure which was more amazing to watch: an elementary schooler floor the judges with perfectly cooked pork belly or the way her young classmates rallied for her at the viewing parties.

At the finale viewing party, the 225 team was both excited and nervous for the finale. I mean, we were invested. We all had butterflies in our stomachs.

I was nervous about how the crowd—at least half of which were small children—would react if she came in second. When you’re that young, losing a game of Monopoly can feel like the end of the world. So how would they react to Avery coming in second when there was $100,000 and hometown pride on the line?

Still, I think most of us were confident she’d win. Avery set up a GoPro on her chair to record the finale. Toward the end of the episode, she pushed through the crowd to a podium, ready to give a speech. That had to mean our girl had it in the bag, right?

But then the judges crowned Addison, Avery’s competitor, MasterChef Junior. I admit, for a good five seconds I was crushed, just like everyone else in the room.

But what happened next amazed me even more than watching Avery cook croquembouche, soufflés and lamb chomps all season.

It only took seconds for the crowd to recover. The last moments of the episode were drowned out by chants of “Avery! Avery! Avery!”

The cheers were so loud and lasted so long that Avery couldn’t even start her speech. In what could have been a disappointing moment, she stood beaming at the crowd.

“I still feel like I’m a winner,” she said. “I made so many good friends, so many great memories. I feel like that in my heart, everyone who has been on that show is a winner.”

She thanked her parents and supporters before offering one final, spunky quip: “Just because I didn’t win MasterChef Junior, doesn’t mean I can’t win MasterChef.”

And there is no doubt in my mind that she can win it.