Culture

Food And Wine's Best New Chefs Honored At Annual Gala Event

Joanna Fantozzi|

Food and Wine Magazine's Best New Chefs Awards honor the rising stars in the culinary world, many of whom go on to become James Beard award winners and household names in the industry like Thomas Keller, Tom Colicchio, Nancy Silverton, Michael Symon, David Chang, and Grant Achatz, who have all been past winners. This year, Food and Wine's People's best new chef is Carl-Thorne Thomsen of Prarie Village in Kansas.The Best New Chefs were honored at this year's gala at The Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side in New York. Chefs like Anne Burrell, past winner Tom Colicchio, Scott Conant, Marc Murphy and Marcus Samuelsson walked the (black) carpet, and sampled small plates from well-known local restaurants and chefs like 2012 winners Mario Carbone and Rich Torrisi, while celebrating the next generation of culinary ingenuity.

The 26th annual Food and Wine Magazine Best New Chef Awards recognized new and talented chefs nationwide: Justin Yu, of Oxheart, in Houston; Cara Stadler, of Tao Yuan, in Brunswick, Maine; Greg Denton and Gabrielle Quinonez Denton, of Ox, in Portland, Ore.; Matthew Accarrino, of SPQR, in San Francisco; Paul Qui, of Qui, in Austin, Texas; Eli Kulp, of Fork, in Philadelphia; Ari Taymor, of Alma, in Los Angeles; Dave Beran, of Next, in Chicago; Matt McCallister, of FT33, in Dallas; and Walker Stern and Joe Ogrodnek, of Dover, in Brooklyn.

This year's group of honorees, as has been pointed out (link to HuffPo), is severely lacking in female presence. Out of the 12 award winners this year, only two are women: Cara Stadler of Tao Yuan, and Gabrielle Quinonez Denton, who is actually one-half of the husband and wife team that runs Ox in Portland. In fact, out of the 56 best new chefs that have been honored by Food and Wine Magazine since 2010, only seven have been women.

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