Carla Hall reportedly leaves Food Network after more than a decade

Chef Carla Hall has reportedly parted ways with Food Network after more than a decade on the channel’s baking competition series, according to a report published Nov. 9.

The report lands in the busiest stretch of Hall’s career since “The Chew” ended in 2018. She has a cookbook out, a new baking show on Fox starting Nov. 19, a YouTube channel built with her old co-stars, and a fried chicken pop-up running in Washington.

Read together, the moves describe a 62-year-old chef trading a single network gig for a portfolio she controls. The Food Network exit is the headline. The rest of the calendar is the story.

TV Insider published the report at 2:15 p.m. on Nov. 9, attributing it to The U.S. Sun. A source told the Sun that Hall “is focusing on her shows on other networks and on her personal projects like her book” and that “she hasn’t been talking to Food Network.” The same source said there were no discussions to bring her back and called the split “just business.”

Hall has not announced a Food Network departure. She did confirm in August that she was leaving “Halloween Baking Championship” before its 12th season premiered Sept. 14. “The end of an era for me. Thank you Halloween Baking,” she wrote on Instagram alongside a montage of her costumes from the show.

Fans filled the comments. One asked who would give the show’s drawn-out “Duuuuuuude” when a baker succeeded. Another wrote, “We gonna miss you real bad, Carla.” The 2026 season replaced Hall with chef Aarti Sequeira alongside returning judges Zac Young and Stephanie Boswell, the Sun reported.

Hall was also absent from the Season 3 premiere of “Harry Potter: Wizards of Baking” earlier in November. Duff Goldman and Sarah Mountain took the seats she and co-judge Jozef Youssef had held, TV Insider reported.

The next platform is Fox. Hall returns for Season 2 of “Next Level Baker” on Nov. 19, mentoring nine home bakers alongside Gordon Ramsay and pastry chef Waylynn Lucas over five weeks of episodes, People reported. Good Housekeeping confirmed the premiere date.

She is also building on YouTube. Last year Hall reunited with her “The Chew” co-stars Clinton Kelly and Michael Symon to launch “Chewed Up,” a video podcast that has grown into a channel. On the Oct. 30 episode of “Today with Jenna & Sheinelle,” Hall said the channel now carries Kelly and Stacy London’s “Why’d They Wear That?,” Symon’s “Simply Symons,” Amanda Freitag’s “Ask Amanda,” and a show from Scott Conant. “I’m coming up with a game show,” she added.

The cookbook arrived Sept. 8. “Carla Bakes” is pitched as a guide to baking with “joy, curiosity, and creating something meaningful with your hands,” according to her website. In August she visited the Library of Congress to narrate her children’s books for the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, the library said on Instagram.

She is also cooking in person. The Washington Business Journal reported on Nov. 6 that Hall is running Bumblebirds, a fried chicken pop-up in Washington, while she promotes the cookbook and talks about navigating uncertainty as a celebrity chef. She is booked at the Food & Wine Classic in Charleston on Nov. 13 to 15, co-hosting an oyster roast with Andrew Zimmern and Anthony Ramos, Hoodline reported. On Nov. 20 she holds a free book signing and pastry pop-up at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

Hall, born in Nashville in 1964, graduated from Howard University with an accounting degree, spent two years as a CPA at Price Waterhouse, then modeled in Paris, Milan and London before enrolling in culinary school, according to her Wikipedia biography. On “Top Chef” she became known for the call-and-response catchphrase “Hootie Hoo!” and her philosophy of “cooking with love.” She finished as a runner-up on “Top Chef: New York” in 2008 and won Fan Favorite on “Top Chef: All-Stars,” beating Fabio Viviani.

She co-hosted “The Chew” on ABC from 2011 until its cancellation in 2018. Her Brooklyn restaurant, Carla Hall’s Southern Kitchen, opened in 2016 and closed in 2017; she has spoken publicly about what the failure taught her. She lives in Washington with her husband, Matthew Lyons.

Her Food Network run ran wide. She judged “Holiday Baking Championship” starting in 2020, hosted and judged “Halloween Baking Championship,” mentored on “Worst Cooks in America” with Anne Burrell, and judged “Best Baker in America,” Wikipedia records. In 2025 she joined Fox’s “Next Level Baker” for its first season. The Food Network gigs were the steady income. The Fox show was the bridge.

What I think

The Food Network report is written as a slow fade. A source told the Sun there were “no hard feelings” and called the split “just business.” The calendar backs that reading. Hall is moving her time from a network that scheduled her to platforms she controls.

Food Network built a generation of chef-celebrities on a formula: put the same face on three baking shows, run them from September through January, repeat. Hall did that work for years and did it well. The formula still pays, but it pays the network more than it pays the chef, and a chef with a cookbook, a YouTube channel and a touring schedule can now keep the receipts.

She is 62. The exit reads less like a retirement than a redistribution of where her hours go. The better question is how many of the network’s longtime faces make the same calculation now that a phone camera and a subscriber base pay roughly what a cable judging gig paid.