On a recent Tuesday morning, a group of longtime volunteers in a SoHo kitchen learned that the reigning Miss Universe, R’Bonney Gabriel, was working at their table.
Minutes after discovering her unusual job title, they got down to business: They wanted to know what restaurants she liked.
Gabriel hasn’t had much time to explore the city’s food scene. She was crowned in January, becoming the first Filipino-American Miss Universe, and, at 28, the oldest.
Gabriel poses with fellow volunteer, Wing Tat Leung, at God's Love We Deliver in Manhattan.
It’s part of the job description, and a tradition dating back to the ‘90s, that the winner of the Miss Universe Competition spends a year living in New York City. Gabriel won the title in New Orleans on a Saturday, and on Sunday, she flew to New York to start work.
And here she was, discussing restaurants at God’s Love We Deliver while preparing chickpea curry platters for New Yorkers too sick to cook or shop for themselves.
As she and the other volunteers ladled vegetables and passed them down the line, Gabriel mentioned a few places she’d enjoyed: pastaRAMEN, Bagel Bob’s, Mr. Chow and Nerai, a Greek spot in Midtown.
The group, which consisted mostly of retirees, seemed baffled by some of the choices. Some did not love the idea of going out to eat in Midtown.
Gabriel is pictured with the CEO of God's Love We Deliver, David Ludwigson.
Jeff Savitch fixated on Mr. Chow. He wanted to know why she’d only gone there for dessert, whether she liked it, and if people there recognized her. When Gabriel said they did not, Savitch replied with the natural follow-up: Why didn’t she milk that Miss Universe title?
“I don’t know how to!” Gabriel protested. “I’m not good at it.”
“You gotta use that title everywhere you go, dear,” Savitch advised.
Gabriel has just under eight months to milk that title. In December, she’ll crown her successor in El Salvador.
Gabriel started late by pageant standards, at 25. She had been teaching sewing in Houston, at a nonprofit design studio called Magpies & Peacocks. She said she “felt a sense of urgency” because she wanted to make it happen before she aged out at 28 – the cut-off age for Miss Universe contestants.
Gabriel kept getting runner-up — at Miss Houston, Miss Kemah and Miss Texas — which was disappointing, but provided enough motivation for her to keep trying.
Gabriel is pictured here in the costume contest at the Miss Universe Competition, in an homage to NASA's moon landing, and to its Artemis program.
Looking back at those near-wins, Gabriel said she’d been trying too hard, stressing too much if she flubbed a word, and accidentally coming across as “robotic” when trying to impress the judges in her two minutes with them.
“They ask a question, then I just start talking about, Hey, this is what I do, I'm a fashion designer, I'm a model, and I do this, this and this,” she said. “And they’d just asked a question like, what is my favorite food?”
People told her to just be herself, but how was she supposed to do that? Finally, she said, “it kind of started to click and I was really just able to walk in a room and show who I am.”
Armed with her new strategy, Gabriel went on a tear of wins: Miss Texas, Miss USA, Miss Universe.
Gabriel said that while she was training, she gave up most of her social life and cut out dinners with friends and even her own family. She met weekly with a local news anchor who has a side hustle as a pageant coach and would quiz Gabriel about current events, which she studied by watching ABC and the BBC and listening to podcasts. Gabriel ate the same meals every day for two years: oatmeal and eggs; shrimp and green beans; salmon and broccoli with rice, plus rice cakes and protein shakes. She also followed a plan and bodybuilding workout assigned by her trainer, whom she’d report to every Saturday.
Gabriel, who described her upbringing as “middle-class,” grew up in a Christian family in Missouri City, Texas. She said she was able to afford her pageant training with a mix of savings, income from her job teaching sewing, family support, and the generosity of people who believed in her.
It paid off. By January, she was like thousands of other professionals, ready to take her career to the next level in the Big Apple. Only her job came with a one-bedroom apartment in a building with a doorman and regular housekeeping located near Central Park, as well as a talent manager, a PR team, a literal crown and a salary of $100,000.
When asked what she does for a living, Gabriel tells people “I'm here for a year contract with my job.”
And it is a job, Miss Universe is required to be a model and a spokesperson for the organization and its various partners: including clothing company Express, and nonprofits like God's Love We Deliver and Smile Train, which serves children born with cleft palates. She must also carve out time for her own cause, sustainable fashion.
There’s extensive travel. In the next few months, she’ll likely fly to Guatemala to work with Smile Train; Thailand for meetings with the new owner of the Miss Universe Organization, Thai billionaire Jakkaphong Jakrajutatip, a trans woman who is a reality TV star in Thailand. Jakrajutatip, whom everyone calls Anne, bought the Miss Universe Organization from Endeavor’s IMG, which bought it from Donald Trump in 2015.
In May, Gabriel will head to the Philippines, where her 85-year-old father grew up. She’s been told fans will be waiting to greet her at the airport.
“Pageants are everything in the Philippines,” she said. “So I know it's gonna be a little bit of chaos.”
Gabriel is pictured here at the Miss Universe Competition.
Throughout her reign, Miss Universe is also expected to produce a steady stream of social media content: and to be hair-and-makeup ready on a moment’s notice in case the organization needs her. The only time she looked at a phone during her three hours at God’s Love We Deliver was when she recorded some video content, which she ran by Miss Universe’s in-house talent manager, Esther Swan.
Hilary Levey Friedman, author of “Here She Is: The Complicated Reign of the Beauty Pageant in America,” said that most people don’t understand how hard it is to be a beauty queen.
“What you see when you watch a pageant is not at all related really to what it means to be the person with that title,” she said. “It is an exhausting position for many reasons, not least of which is, who you are as a person matters less than the title.”
Levey Friedman, who is also the daughter of Miss America 1970, said there’s a pressure on Miss Universe contestants to be “putting stories up every day, and it has to look a certain way, or you want a certain aesthetic.” That, she said, “is a very heightened concern for women even I observe in their 20s today.” In that regard, she said, the pageant mirrors the complicated pressures many young women feel today.
Miss Universe is a blockbuster brand that is broadcast in 150 countries and watched by hundreds of millions of people globally, according to the organization.
In the US, TV ratings have dwindled. The 2023 competition was not broadcast on network television; it was streamed on Roku and broadcast on Telemundo.
Levey Friedman said the popularity of pageants tends to vary by location. It has gone “way, way, way down” as some women have gained other opportunities to shine in sports or at work. And, she added, “for some people, this is still what they want to do, and that shouldn't be closed off to them, either.”
Americans have not grown tired of watching thin, young, able-bodied women compete for attention in swimsuits — but today there are other venues to find this, often with more drama on shows like “The Bachelor” and “Perfect Match” and “Keeping up With the Kardashians” — or never-ending content on bigger platforms, such as some pockets of Instagram and TikTok.
Last year, in an effort to “modernize,” the Miss Universe Organization allowed mothers and pregnant, married or divorced contestants to compete. Gabriel said she is none of those things, but thinks it’s great that the pageant is becoming more inclusive.
“It's really opening a door for more women that have dreams of becoming Miss Universe to be able to do that,” she said.
Gabriel said New Yorkers have a mixed reaction to beauty pageants. The biggest misunderstanding, she said, is “that we’re not intelligent women.”
“I think people that are not familiar with pageants, they think of that final show when we're on stage in a swimsuit, in a gown, and we say that one question and then that's it,” she said. “But I feel like I was in school studying for Miss Universe.”
One thing New Yorkers do understand is status. Levey Friedman has observed that, particularly in a city like New York, “having a title matters.”
“To say ‘I’m Miss Universe’ immediately tells someone – whether they agree with it or not – that you’ve achieved something,” she said.
Gabriel said she was proud of how hard she’d worked, and that years of training had transformed her from a shy person into someone who could speak confidently in public.
Back at God's Love We Deliver, it was hard to picture Gabriel as a former shy person. She seemed at ease with every cook, staffer and volunteer she encountered. She charmed the professional baker with her piping on birthday cakes, chatted with a group from an insurance company doing a corporate day of service, made small talk with the CEO, and cheerfully obliged requests for selfies.
After her shift ended, she still had 100 posters to sign and a scheduled Zoom class to learn Tagalog in preparation for her upcoming trip to the Philippines.
She was going to take the E train. It wasn’t her usual train, so Swan, her manager, reminded her where to get off.
