“Food and wine best new chefs 2022” is a keyword that has been searched for many years on the most prominent culinary expert topic. Are you ready to learn about the best food and wine new chefs now!
The annual ranking of the country’s “Best New Chefs” was just published by Food & Wine magazine. Getting on that list used to be a terrific way to accelerate your professional path. If you follow the culinary world in any way, you’ll know a lot of the names on the list of previous winners. However, unless you lived in the same city as them and ate out often, you were far less likely to identify them the year they were selected to the list.
Food and wine best new chefs 2022
That’s because Food & Wine does an excellent job each year of identifying young up-and-comers and throwing a national spotlight on them when only local recognition had previously existed.
Let’s have a look at this year’s winners before I get too carried away:
- Saint-Blake Germain’s Aguillard and Trey Smith in New Orleans
- Anju’s Angel Barreto in Washington, D.C.
- All Day Baby’s Thessa Diadem in Los Angeles
- Horn Barbecue in Oakland, California, is owned by Matt Horn.
- Miss Kim in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is Ji Hye Kim.
- Magna Kusina’s Carlo Lamagna in Portland, Ore.
- State Bird Provisions’ Gaby Maeda in San Francisco
- Suerte Fermn Nez Fermn Nez Fermn Nez Fermn Nez Fermn Nez Fermn Nez Fermn Nez
- In New York City, Lucas Sin of Nice Day and Junzi Kitchen
- Bakers Against Racism’s Paola Velez in Washington, D.C.
This year’s Best New Chefs class is an excellent example of this leadership style. There’s the chef in Austin who is leading an ambitious in-house masa program while also prioritizing his team’s mental health, and the pastry chef in Washington, D.C., who is baking whimsical desserts centered on the flavors of her Dominican heritage while also organizing bake sales to combat racism. There’s the scrappy chef in Portland, Oregon, who’s making America fall in love with the robust and complex flavors of Filipino food while also creating a community gathering space, and the chef in Ann Arbor, Michigan, who combines Midwestern produce with centuries-old Korean recipes while also paying her staff well above market rates and providing a slew of benefits.
From coast to coast, the Best New Chefs of 2022 is redefining what it means to lead in the kitchen while preparing the food that matters most to them. Restaurants may not look the same, but I’m thrilled to see—and eat—what the future holds with this group of chefs at the helm.
1. Matt Horn
- Horn Barbecue, Oakland, CA
Matt Horn discovered his life’s calling in the crackling flames of the fire he had just kindled in his grandmother’s garden. He continues, “The smoke is in your face, you can hear the wood splitting, you can see the embers, you can see the coals being made.” “For me, it was life-changing. I lost track of time. It didn’t matter what was going on around me.” He was hooked, and there was no turning back now. Horn decided right then and there that he would devote the rest of his life to mastering the art of barbecuing.
2. Paola Velez
- Bakers Against Racism, Washington, D.C.
Velez’s pastries are unrepentant in their size and taste, with thick sticky buns ribbed with pureed sweet plantain, heavy cookies she calls “thickens” stuffed with matcha powder, and white chocolate bits, and strawberry knafeh, brilliant pink with fruit and heaped high with phyllo shards. They will not be relegated to the background or as an afterthought to a meal. They aren’t subtle at all. They aren’t easily broken. They are artistic and cultural manifestations that are meant to be celebrated. They remind me of Velez.
3. Carlo Lamagna
- Magna Kusina, Portland, OR
Carlo Lamagna views Filipino food in the same way he does Grand Prix racing: He drives with incredible elegance and accuracy, yet he isn’t hesitant to put his foot down. The translucent broth that serves as the foundation for Lamagna’s sinigang at Magna Kusina in Portland, Oregon, has the exquisite shine of consommé but is far from delicate in taste. With tamarind punches stitched together by tomato, fish stock and fish sauce, onions, and garlic, it thoroughly embraces its sour undertones. Then there’s the bagoong alamang, a condiment made from fermented shrimp paste mixed with garlic, fish sauce, and palm sugar, which has an electric, elemental stink. Lamagna’s favorite childhood food gets a cheffy makeover in the form of mangga at bagoong alamang: It’s served in a miniature boat cut from raw green mango and topped with a shower of delicious flower petals.
4. Thessa Diadem
- All Day Baby, Los Angeles, CA
It’s been said that you eat with your eyes first, and it’s difficult not to have your eyes bulge with hunger when you see chef Thessa Diadem’s silky ube pie pieces. It’s one of the newest additions at All Day Baby in Los Angeles’ pastry case, and it’s a show-stopper. The rich ube custard lies sturdily in an unbelievably flaky crust, a hue of purple so intense and brilliant that Prince would be envious. Each piece is crowned with a cascade of chamomile-spiked whipped cream puffs that resemble clouds gathering before a storm. The ube pie is a homage to Diadem’s Filipina roots (she emigrated to the US at the age of 13), but it also symbolizes her larger strategy in the kitchen, which is to use the most worldly tastes she can find locally.
5. Angel Barreto
- Anju, Washington, D.C.
When Angel Barreto purchased 150 pounds of salted shrimp for Anju, the restaurant he owns in Washington, D.C., a salesman didn’t think he was serious. Despite the fact that the item was in stock, the salesman said that Barreto didn’t “need” it. It’s not the first (or the last) time someone has been astonished to learn that Barreto, who is half Puerto Rican and half Black and wears an ear-to-ear smile, is the owner of one of D.C.’s most famous Korean eateries. “There are very few [chefs] who look like me who prepare Asian food, particularly Korean food,” he adds, his voice filled with compassion rather than irritation.
6. Ji Hye Kim
- Miss Kim, Ann Arbor, MI
“A lot of individuals have wanted to be a chef since they were three years old,” says Ji Hye Kim, owner of Miss Kim in Ann Arbor, Michigan. “That is not at all my tale. I began thinking about it when I was 30 years old.” Kim was raised in Seoul, South Korea, surrounded by amazing food. Kim, now 43, grew up with a brilliant and enthusiastic chef for a mother, so she took wonderful food for granted in many respects. “It’s been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.” Kim’s mother, on the other hand, would never let her assist in the kitchen, and she eventually gave up.
7. Blake Aguillard and Trey Smith
- Saint-Germain, New Orleans, LA
Chefs Blake Aguillard and Trey Smith are enormous geeks, to put it bluntly. The chefs and co-owners of New Orleans’ Saint-Germain openly geek out over ikejime, a Japanese fish butchering technique (it’s considered more humane and helps keep menu prices down), or the results of a fermentation experiment (transforming scraps of venison into garum, a fish sauce–like condiment that takes three months to make). It’s difficult not to get swept up in their honest and contagious enthusiasm.
8. Gaby Maeda
- State Bird Provisions, San Francisco, CA
“Every day when I go to work, I’m just as eager as the first day,” Gaby Maeda says. Maeda is the chef de cuisine at State Bird Provisions in San Francisco, where she and her crew prepare a menu of bright and punchy California cuisine that is heavy on local vegetables and influenced by Asian flavors. She has spent almost a decade and a half working in professional kitchens, and she loves it. “All I want to do is work hard with my team every day and help them improve.”
9. Lucas Sin
- Nice Day, New York, NY
Lucas Sin is on a quest to make General Tso’s chicken the best it can be. His objective was to create a version of the sticky-sweet, deep-fried fowl dish for Nice Day, his contemporary American Chinese restaurant in New York, that was crisp when served and had a sauce that was vicious but not gloopy, garlicky but not overpowering.
Despite the fact that General Tso’s is one of the most popular dishes in American Chinese restaurants, according to Sin’s study, there is no conventional technique to prepare it. He’s gone through cookbooks, spent hours studying the internet, sampled as many different kinds as he could find, and spoken to Chinese chefs all across the nation, but no one can agree on what makes General Tso’s so good.
