The people are hungry for Spike.

Spike Mendelsohn, or “Chef Spike” from Bravo’s “Top Chef,” recently opened the Good Stuff Eatery a half block from my office in Washington, and it’s all people can talk about.

Sure, it helps that the strip of Capitol Hill by the Library of Congress is devoid of lunch options, and there’s only so many times you can eat at Cosi or get Indian food from the liquor store before you start to daydream about a new lunch joint opening in the neighborhood. But this is so much more than the usual buzz.

Spike sightings abound. Before the final episode of the show, there was a lot of water-cooler talk devoted to whether or not he had won the show, and was using his winnings to open up the burger joint in the old Pulp building on Pennsylvania Ave. Everyone seems to have a story involving that hat — seeing his ubiquitous fedora popping into and out of the new restaurant space.

When I got invited to the press preview of the restaurant, I became a minor celebrity myself. People wanted to know the before and after. I tried to downplay it, but then I found myself succumbing.

“And then tomorrow, I’m having breakfast with him,” I told friends and coworkers, basking in second-hand, second-rate fame.

They oohed and ahhed, telling me how lucky I was, peppering me with questions about the Top Chef contestant.

There were at least two dozen reporters and photographers at the press preview for what is essentially a burger joint. As our food was being prepared, passing pedestrians wouldn’t stop knocking on the door, asking to be let in.

Spike’s father, Harvey, acted as the bouncer, turning the steady stream of people away. He assured them Good Stuff would be open for business on the next Monday, and asked them to please return.

The people peered over his shoulder to the griddle Spike was manning, and at the huge photograph of Spike in his signature black-and-white straw fedora.

“This is Spike’s place, right?” One woman asked if she could get his autograph on one of the takeaway menus.

How on earth did we get here?

There was a time when a cook worked hard for years, faceless and anonymous on a hot line. Grueling years of apprenticeship were followed by night after night at the fry station or salad station until perhaps, one day, a cook might gain just enough notoriety and investors to open a restaurant with his name on it.

Now, Tony Bourdain is practically a rock star. Emeril tapes before a live audience and has quotable catch phrases. Rocco gets his eyes done and endorses frozen pasta. America has embraced this normally reclusive and private profession, waiting in line at bookstores for signings or sitting in the audience for Iron Chef America.

But always, at the heart of a celebrity chef was a chef — somebody who came up through the line, worked hard and made good food.

This is where Bravo has turned the celebrity chef paradigm on its ear. Sure, the contestants can cook; the rigors are far too difficult for even the most skilled amateur. But when Bravo is through with them, they’ve become celebrities first, and the food is practically an afterthought.

I mean, a burger is a burger (even though Spike makes a damn good one). Those people weren’t banging down Good Stuff’s door because they were hoping for a great plate of food. They wanted to be near a celebrity.

Spike understands this and is leveraging this unique cross-section of food and celebrity for every dollar that it’s worth.

“Top Chef was an opportunity to slingshot me into a household name,” he tells the two dozen members of the press, a gaggle of reporters that might not otherwise cover the opening of a neighborhood burger joint, if not for the celebrity chef angle.

He goes on to say that the show can jump-start any promising culinary career, and that he would absolutely recommend the experience to any young, ambitious chef.

The show is, for him, a way to skip 15 or more years of paying one’s dues before reaping the rewards. Whether those dues-paying years are important in the development of a good chef is not addressed.

Coffee, Eggs and Sudden Stardom

The next day, I meet Spike for breakfast at the small Korean diner on the Hill. We are drinking coffee as quickly as the waitress can refill our cups, and sopping up runny egg yolks with limp wheat toast.

Face to face, Spike comes across as humble and thoughtful, and strikes me as being very self-aware of the unique position he finds himself in. I bring up the subject of chefs-as-celebrities.

“It is really surreal,” he says. “In the past 10 or 15 years the culinary world has shifted. The phenomenon of rock star chef is amazing.”

Long before the show, Spike had planned to open a restaurant — most likely a burger joint — in the old Pulp space on Capitol Hill. He mentions several times that he’s been paying rent on the space for a year, but was waiting until the concept, the food and the timing was just right before opening the doors.

It was while he was in the midst of taping the show that the potential for his brand as a chef and TV personality became clear. Spike knew full well that he was being cast as the fun-loving bad boy, and he played it up, knowing that later he could translate that into a name and someday, an empire.

Better than any other contestant in the four seasons of the show, Spike has figured out how to leverage his name into a profitable future. When I mention this, his eyes grow large.

“Oh, definitely. It’s almost better that I didn’t win, because Bravo owns you if you win. It makes it really difficult to start your own projects like I’m doing if you actually win the whole show.”

Which is not to say he threw the results on purpose. He still seems genuinely annoyed, even regretful, that the scallops that he chose for his challenge-losing dish turned out to be frozen.

But he knows that loss might have turned out to be an advantage: While Bravo is running Stephanie ragged on a cross-country Top Chef bus tour, Spike has been able to focus on Good Stuff.

Looking back on the whole season now that it’s been edited and aired, Spike feels good about how he was portrayed — exactly as he is in real life: sometimes a schemer, sometimes serious, always loyal and always in love with food.

I ask him the question that has irked me about Top Chef since I started watching in the second season. Doesn’t the show actually exemplify the opposite of what it takes to be a ‘top chef’?

The best chefs are meticulous, repetitive and consistent. Their primary ability is to knock out perfect facsimiles of their dishes night after night. Sure, they need to be creative, but they have the time and luxury of crafting a dish and refining it over and over until it’s perfect. With Top Chef’s time limits and get it right the first time mentality, it seems to reward the best improvisers, not the top chefs.

“You are exactly right,” he smiles in recognition. “There are definitely aspects of being a chef that are found in Top Chef - sometimes you are feeding a banquet of 50 people, and an extra 30 show up and you need to know what to do - but otherwise, you’re exactly right.” To create drama and narrative, and to rescue the viewer from the boredom of watching a real professional kitchen, Bravo is forced to emphasize the stress and personality over the slow crafting of dishes, just another way that it creates celebrities more than top chefs.

The old generation of celebrity chefs had to cook great food first, and hopefully had a telegenic personality that could rocket them to fame. Top Chefs come at it from the other way. Spike saw the potential for his personality (and his hat!) to become a brand, but he had to cook food that would keep his public hungry for more.

This is where the genius of the burger joint comes in. Anyone who watched Top Chef can afford to eat at Good Stuff. With burgers around $6, he’d like to welcome each and every one of them into his place.

“I’ve been really careful to create relationships with my vendors, and to lock them into fair prices so that I can continue to provide a very high quality product at a price that people will be willing to pay. I wanted my customers to be able to get an affordable lunch, not some fancy, gourmet, $20 hamburger.”

We end up spending a lot of time just geeking about where to find really good charcuterie plates in D.C., or about the magic going on in the workshop at El Bulli in Barcelona.

Spike is committed to local produce and local vendors. Though he only moved to DC from New York City a month ago, he has been cultivating relationships for over a year, visiting slaughterhouses and pastures, farms and production plants.

He makes a point of mentioning that his burgers, made from Virginia cows but he won’t say exactly where, are always done medium rare. “There’s nothing worse than an overcooked hamburger,” he says. His burgers drip with juice and glisten with fat, staying moist and bearing an intensely delicious beef flavor. I tried the bacon cheeseburger, and the bacon was thick cut, smoky and sweet, good quality and from producers who care about the pigs they’re raising.

The fries at Good Stuff are an even more secretive matter. He mentions at the press briefing that he is using a secret potato that is ideal for making fries. When pressed, he will only say that he believes he is the only person in America using this type of potato for French frying.

Later, over breakfast, I bring it up again and he stays mum. He will only tell me that it is locally grown. To his credit, the French fries are delicious, crispy and creamy at once, tossed in rosemary and flakes of salt.

The milkshakes and custards are all handmade, and they are really spectacular. I end up drinking every last drop of my toasted marshmallow shake — a thick vanilla number with two toasted marshmallows on top for garnish — even though it is well past the boundaries of good sense. The quart of bing cherry ice cream I brought back to the office was a hit, not too sweet and with the perfect summertime essence of ripe cherries.

When I asked him why he didn’t want to open a fine dining restaurant with his Top Chef fame, he leans back, like I’m accusing him something he doesn’t want to be accused of. The extra attention of being on Top Chef would most likely work against him, he explains.

“People cast a very critical eye on fine dining,” he tells me. His name brand might have magnified that scrutiny, in a role he admits he’s not ready for yet. “Listen, I’m 27, I’m still young and inexperienced and I have a lot to learn.”

He has his future mapped out, and it is an ambitious one. He opened up the Sunnyside Restaurant Group, with offices above Good Stuff, to expedite the expansion of his empire. He is already poised to open three more Good Stuffs in Dupont, Adams Morgan and Rosslyn. He has his sights on a location nearby for a French bistro. In his vision of his future, he works his way up to fine dining.

Of course, it will all come back to the food, and he knows it.

In the meantime, after just a few weeks of Good Stuff’s opening, it seems the novelty of having a Top Chef in D.C. has not worn off. There’s a constant line snaking out of the front door and down to the corner, and even that is not enough to dissuade people from waiting in the hot sun to step up to the counter and order a burger from a celebrity.