Meet the 2023 Food & Wine Best New Chefs

For the first time since 2020, it feels like the restaurant industry has finally been able to put the grueling fight for survival firmly in the rearview mirror. Gone are the days of constant pivoting to keep the doors open. Instead, chefs are focusing on the reasons they had for wanting to open those doors in the first place. But it would be a mistake to think that restaurants are the same as they were before the pandemic.

This year, as I traveled the country looking for the 35th class of Food & Wine Best New Chefs, I heard, everywhere, a change in vocabulary: Instead of “how” to run a restaurant, chefs were asking themselves about the “why” of what they do. A new level of intentionality has emerged — restaurants are aiming to be not only places of celebration and joy for customers, but also sources of ongoing, sustainable education and growth for all who work in them. It became crystal clear as I ate my way through 23 cities around the country that the most interesting restaurants were not just the ones focused on cooking the most delicious food, but the ones with a larger mission in mind — something each member of this year’s class of Best New Chefs embodies.

There’s Steven Pursley, who is determined to feed you the best bowl of ramen possible with perfectly bouncy housemade noodles, out of an assuming strip mall in St. Louis. Or Eunji Lee in New York City, who shows it is possible to seamlessly blend immaculate French pastry techniques with vibrant flavors from her childhood in Seoul and her deep admiration for art. Take a trip to Texas, and you will find not one but two chefs putting the story and flavors of heirloom corn at the center of their menus. Although Emmanuel Chavez and Edgar Rico have wildly different approaches, their respect and belief in the importance of maize are the same. And in Philadelphia, Amanda Shulman demonstrates that it is in fact possible to cook highly seasonal food, with a menu that changes every two weeks, while not taking yourself too seriously and also having weekends off.

Each of these chefs has clearly found their “why.” More impressively, each of them manages to pursue their missions while at the same time running restaurants with healthy work environments. There is no compromise on integrity. There is no compromise on leadership. And that commitment — to vision, values, and ambition — carries over into the dining room, where there’s zero compromise on the big flavors and groundbreaking cooking that have defined every class of F&W Best New Chefs since the first class in 1988.

Read on to meet the 2023 class of Best New Chefs. 

Amanda Shulman

While many college kids were doing keg stands and eating cereal or instant ramen for every meal, when she was an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, Amanda Shulman would go to the Italian Market in Philadelphia to buy a whole pig. She would spend a weekend breaking the animal down and transforming it into five courses of pork for a dozen or so paying dinner guests. On other weekends, she would play around with a pasta machine and make a multicourse pasta dinner from scratch. Read more.

Edgar Rico

It was clear from the beginning that Edgar Rico was going to be a chef. At the age of 11, after watching a few too many hours of Food Network, he decided he was going to make Thanksgiving dinner for his parents. For his high school graduation present, he didn’t want a trip to Cancun, but instead dinner at Nobu in Los Angeles. He eventually started working at a steakhouse in his hometown of Visalia in California’s Central Valley before attending The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. Read more.

Aisha Ibrahim

It all started with a bet. At the age of 19, Aisha Ibrahim experienced a serious knee injury that sidelined her from her college basketball team, and she was feeling unmoored — until a teammate presented her with a challenge: “I bet you can’t cook anything out of this cookbook,” she told Ibrahim, pointing to a copy of Mastering the Art of French Cooking by Julia Child. “I’m such a hardcore person; that’s the last thing that anyone needed to tell me,” says Ibrahim today with a laugh. Ibrahim pulled off Child’s crêpe recipe. A roommate showed her how to zest an orange for the batter, and she was hooked. “I remember how perfumed it became. I thought to myself that cooking was this magical world.” At the end of her sophomore year, Ibrahim dropped out of college to move to California, a state she had never been to before, to go to culinary school at the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco, carried forward by a sense of determination and self-belief that would help shape her into the leader that she is today. Read more.

Isabel Coss

Coss is a proud “postre chef,” as she likes to call herself, using the Spanish word for “dessert.” Though she has spent many years working in professional kitchens, she still has a childlike wonder and excitement when it comes to her work. She is always eager to learn, going so far as to wake up at 4 a.m. to improve her ice cream–making skills at The Creamery at Union Market while running the pastry program full-time at Lutèce. (She also hopes to open a Mexican ice cream shop one day.) Read more.

Steven Pursley

Pursley is extremely laid-back in nature but has a quiet intensity when he latches onto something. That intensity has driven his restaurant career, which he came to unexpectedly: He wanted to be a lawyer, majoring in political science as an undergrad. He took one day of classes at engineering school before deciding to move to Okinawa, Japan, where his mother is from and where he’d spent part of his childhood, to study ramen instead. Read more.

Nando Chang and Valerie Chang

The most impressive item in Miami’s Design District, essentially a large outdoor mall packed with luxury stores, is not the $30,000 watch at Bulgari or the $5,000 purse at Dior — but a $28 plate of squid at Itamae, a restaurant run by siblings Nando and Valerie Chang. Their bigfin reef squid are arranged like a flower, floating in a pool of vivid orange sauce dotted with mercurial, mesmerizing puddles of verdant green oil. The dish is a shock to the system, ripping with acid and tongue-encompassing heat thanks to the ají limo leche de tigre made from fermented chiles and yuzu. The green puddles are a housemade huacatay (black mint) oil that lends the dish herbaceous and citrus notes. To call it a roller coaster of flavor would be an understatement: It’s not a dish for those who favor gentle flavors, but rather for those who prefer an adrenaline rush with their food. Read more.

Hannah Ziskin

The best slices of cake in Los Angeles are found not at a bakery, but behind the counter of a modest-looking pizza spot in Echo Park. But don’t walk into Quarter Sheets expecting pastry chef and co-owner Hannah Ziskin to serve you pedestrian flavors like chocolate, vanilla, or funfetti. Her brick-shaped slices, lovingly referred to as “slabs,” are stacked, layered feats of tender, delicate cake, robust seasonal fruit, and unexpected combinations that might include ginger chiffon cake with puckery yuzu Bavarian cream and blackberry-Lambrusco jam, or polenta olive oil chiffon with a tangy crème fraîche Chantilly cream and rose-geranium preserves. Read more.

Ed Szymanski

At the age of 11, Ed Szymanski decided that he was going to be an investment banker. He spent his childhood in South West London studying mathematics, eventually finding himself at the prestigious London School of Economics. Bored, Szymanski, a self-described foodie, decided to get a job working in a professional kitchen when one of his favorite restaurants posted a tweet looking for help. Little did he know, that tweet would change the course of his life. Read more.

Eunji Lee

If you ever needed proof that manifestation works, just take a look at the notebook of 18-year-old Eunji Lee. “I wrote that I hoped to open an edible gallery one day,” says Lee. “My mom still has the notebook.” In 2022, the pastry chef opened the doors to Lysée in New York City’s Flatiron District. In many ways, the two-story space is exactly as teenage Lee envisioned: The top floor, with its soaring ceilings and dramatically minimalist white space, feels like a museum. A selection of Lee’s stunning pastries — from a crispy stacked mille-feuille oozing with thick vanilla cream and sticky caramel to a mesmerizing pile of conjoined croissants, dubbed the Full Moon, whose laminated layers coil around each other — is displayed along the back wall and on a long table that cuts across the space. Read more.

Emmanuel Chavez

There is little that matters more to Emmanuel Chavez than maize. The chef nixtamalizes 80 pounds of masa a week at his Houston restaurant Tatemó, and corn is everywhere on the menu. For the restaurant’s fluffy pancakes, Chavez dehydrates masa before turning it into a flour and mixing it with buttermilk. For the kampachi ceviche that often kicks off the tasting menu, the chef tosses pieces of the fatty fish with lime juice, fish sauce, white soy sauce, and gently sweet corn milk (the liquid released from a fresh corn cob). A plate of enmoladas features maize two ways: first in the lissome tortilla that arrives packed with oyster mushrooms and also in the mole negro that drenches the dish made with blackened leftover tortillas, dashi, several types of chile, and galletas María, a beloved Mexican cookie. Even dessert pushes the boundaries of corn: A crispy masa flour buñuelo is served with a scoop of masa ice cream and a silky mousse made from corn cobs steeped in buttermilk and heavy cream. Read more.

About our Methodology

Food & Wine chooses the Best New Chefs after a monthslong selection process. Chefs who have been in charge of a kitchen or pastry program for five years or less are eligible for the F&W Best New Chef accolade. The process begins with F&W editors soliciting and vetting nominations from food writers, cookbook authors, Best New Chef alums, and other trusted experts around the country. Then, Restaurant Editor Khushbu Shah travels the country, visiting 23 cities in 3 months and dining out in dozens of restaurants in search of the most promising and dynamic chefs right now. After the chefs are notified of their Best New Chef award, F&W conducts background checks and requires each chef to share an anonymous multilingual survey with their staff that aims to gauge the workplace culture at each chef’s establishment. F&W follows this process with the Best New Chef Mentorship Program. The purpose: to help empower new Best New Chefs to grow personally and professionally as they face new challenges and opportunities in their careers.