Diverse list highlights ‘what food looks like now,’ editor says
Food & Wine magazine painted its vision of the food world Tuesday with its release of its annual list of the 10 Best New Chefs.
It’s a diverse group that Food & Wine restaurant editor Jordana Rothman praised for plumbing the depths of their roots to create food that spoke to their heritages.
“Over the course of six months, 24 cities and about 30,000 miles, I encountered chefs wading into the ever-more-intimate deep, committing to the detail work of cuisine rooted in identity, choosing always, to take the long way home,” she said in her introduction of the chefs.
“This is what food looks like right now at the edge of a decade of transformation in American restaurants. An age in which fine dining loosened up; in which the food world recognized the limitations of a Eurocentric culture and came to understand what it was missing without kimchi and nam prik and jerk; in which critics wondered, blindly, where all the women and people of color were hiding, then found them in plain sight, aprons knotted, heads down, sometimes twice as good but half as seen. It was a decade that recognized, far too late, that professional kitchens weren’t always fair places (or healthy places, or safe places) and began the work of transforming itself.”
Food & Wine’s annual list has boosted the careers of many chefs. Past winners of the 31-year-old award include Nancy Silverton, Thomas Keller, Tom Colicchio, Nobu Matsuhisa and David Chang.
Joining those ranks this year are:
Bryan Furman of B’s Cracklin’ Barbeque with locations in Atlanta and Savannah, Ga.
Caroline Glover of Annette in Aurora, Colo.
Brandon Go of Hayato in Los Angeles
Matthew Kammerer of Harbor House inn in Elk, Calif.
Paxx Caraballo Moll of Jungle BaoBao in San Juan, Puerto Rico
Misti Norris of Petra and the Beast in Dallas
Kwame Onwuachi (pictured above) of Kith and Kin in Washington, D.C.
Junghyun Park of Atomix in New York City
Mutsuko Soma of Kamonegi in Seattle
Nite Yun of Nyum Bai in Oakland, Calif.
Contact Bret Thorn at [email protected]
Follow him on Twitter: @foodwriterdiary
June 12, 2019: A misspelling of Mutsuko Soma's name has been corrected.
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