Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About How F&W Picks Best New Chefs

On this episode

How did Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs go from an idea sparked by a chance lunch to one of the culinary world’s greatest honors? The award’s creator, former Food & Wine editor Malachy Duffy, and restaurant editor Erika Adams take you behind the scenes of nearly four decades of scouting, secret deliberations, surprising misses, hard-earned lessons, and the one year there were no Best New Chefs at all.

More about Malachy Duffy and Erika Adams

As an editor, Malachy Duffy served in staff positions at Time, Inc. and magazines such as Bloomberg Personal Finance, House Beautiful, and Travel & Leisure. During his many years as senior editor of Food & Wine, he was responsible for the magazine’s restaurant, wine, and design coverage, and spearheaded several special issues. He also created the Best New Chef Awards, and was part of the small group that created and launched the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen. As a writer, his articles have appeared in such varied publications as the New York Times, Bon Appetit, Metropolitan Home, County Living, and Town & Country. For many years, he wrote under the pseudonym “Andrew Harper” for The Hideaway Report. He was the first American nominated for the Glenfiddich Award for Travel Writing in Scotland.

Erika Adams is the restaurant editor of Food & Wine. Prior to her role at Food & Wine, she was an editor and reporter at Eater for over five years, covering the dining scenes in both New York City and Boston. Before Eater, she was a restaurant reporter for industry trade publication Skift Table, and a retail reporter for Racked. Her work has been published in a variety of media outlets including Punch, the Infatuation, New York Magazine, and Boston Magazine.

About the host

Kat Kinsman is the executive features editor at Food & Wine, author of Hi, Anxiety: Life With a Bad Case of Nerves, host of Food & Wine’s Gold Signal Award-winning and Folio Award-nominated podcast Tinfoil Swans, and founder of Chefs With Issues.

What Malachy Duffy and Erika Adams talk about on this episode

• How Food & Wine’s Best New Chefs began in 1988 and the chance Thomas Keller meal that helped spark the idea
• How the first Best New Chefs were scouted and selected
• The phone calls, letters, menus, and business cards behind the pre-internet process
• What makes someone a Best New Chef, then and now
• How the award expanded beyond what’s on the plate to include leadership
• The confidential restaurant staff feedback that’s now part of the selection process
• The chefs who got away, and Malachy Duffy’s regret over Charlie Trotter
• What happened in 1992, the only year without a Best New Chefs class
• The tensions behind Food & Wine’s short-lived restaurant awards partnership
• Why multiple scouts and second opinions matter in such a subjective process
• How scouting the entire country has evolved over nearly four decades
• The physical realities of eating in restaurants for a living
• How winners are secretly notified — including Food & Wine’s fake story pitches
• What happens to chefs after they receive the award
• The history and evolution of Best New Chefs at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen
• Why the integrity of the selection process has mattered from the beginning
• What Malachy Duffy and Erika Adams hope Best New Chefs becomes in the future

Quotes from Malachy Duffy and Erika Adams

“I’d been downtown and I thought I’d walk back and maybe find some nice place for lunch. Walked by this new restaurant on Lower Seventh Avenue called Rakel. I hadn’t heard of it. The name intrigued me. I walked in, and I said, ‘What does Rakel mean?’ And they said, ‘It was started by two people, Raoul, from Raoul’s Brasserie over in SoHo, and a chef Thomas Keller. They put the names together, Rakel.’ I looked at the menu, and I thought, ‘This looks really interesting.’ Hadn’t quite seen anything like it. So, I had lunch and loved it, and I could not wait to get back to the office and tell people about this discovery.

I was talking with Ila Stanger, then the editor-in-chief, and I said, ‘We’re doing chefs more and more in the magazine. What if we did some kind of chef award program?’ And she said, ‘Go back to your office, think about it, and in the next few days, come up with a proposal for this and how you would do it.’ I started thinking about it, and one thing that seemed to make sense to me was to do new chefs, because we were trying to do that more in the magazine because they were doing different things culinarily, and the test kitchen seemed interested.” — Malachy Duffy

“When I walked up to the 2025 Best New Chefs in Aspen, I was nervous to meet everybody. Jordan Rubin, a member of the class who owns Mr. Tuna in Portland, Maine — prior to this job, I was covering the restaurant scene in New England, so I was familiar with him and his work — immediately stood up, and he’s like, ‘I remember when you came into Bar Futo three years ago,’ or something like that. I was just like, ‘Oh, OK. This is going to be all right.’ We hugged, and it was the perfect first moment. Then we just hung out for hours, and just getting to know them. These are people who are so talented, and so forward-looking, and just at this moment of their careers, right? Where they’re about to take off. But they’re still human. And the conversations that we had were just so lovely. And at one point, I think it was Telly Justice, pulled out a whole truffle from her jacket pocket. Someone went and found a microplane, and then we just started shaving truffles over everything that we ordered.” — Erika Adams

“Believe me, your heart will be broken. This is something I’ve thought about many times over the years. There was one person I have always felt bad about, and that was Charlie Trotter from Chicago. Nobody ever raised a stink. There was no lobbying, no bad blood, no bitter recriminations or anything. I think looking back, we made a mistake. I probably made a mistake.” — Malachy Duffy

“Nobu Matsuhisa was one of our early winners. I did the screening for that. I’ve got to tell you, Matsuhisa in Los Angeles originally was in a strip mall, and it was not fancy. I was very happy we did that for two reasons. One, to break out a little bit of the more traditional culinary traditions, which were French, Italian, whatever. But also to do something that wasn’t fancy with white tablecloths and sterling silver, china, and subdued lighting and fancy artwork on the wall.” — Malachy Duffy

“It was a lot of learning to figure out how to do it sustainably. I really like this work. I want to be doing this for my full career. I needed to figure out how to be eating out at restaurants three to four times a week, and that’s just regularly, not during scouting season. How do you do that in a way that I could keep doing that year after year? I think one of the biggest things I learned was I don’t have to finish every single thing on the table to be able to assess what is happening, and just being comfortable with over-ordering, but not necessarily finishing everything, taking stuff home, doing all of that. Really thinking about it in the context of work, not play.” — Erika Adams

“In 1992 [the one year there were no Best New Chefs awards], there was a discussion with the National Restaurant Association about joining forces to do restaurant awards. This, of course, raised questions about conflict of interest, who was going to control what, who was going to make decisions, how was it going to be done? It was a can of worms, but where it came from on high, ‘You’re going to make this work. We’re doing this, and that’s it.’ There were problems, and we had all sorts of conflicts and disagreements over how the selection was going to be made. There was some give-and-take, and none of us were happy with it. I was particularly unhappy and made that be known.” — Malachy Duffy

“We are really looking at how they are as leaders. We assess how they’re running the restaurants. There’s actually a full survey that we send out to the finalists that they then have to send out to their staff. They give reviews of how this person is in the kitchen, how they are as a leader. And the chef doesn’t see that. The reviews come straight to us. We’re looking over all of that as part of the assessment, which started three years ago.” — Erika Adams

These interview excerpts have been edited for clarity.

About the podcast

Food & Wine has led the conversation around food, drinks, and hospitality in America and around the world since 1978. Tinfoil Swans continues that legacy with a new series of intimate, informative, surprising, and uplifting interviews with the biggest names in the culinary industry and beyond, sharing never-before-heard stories about the successes, struggles, and fork-in-the-road moments that made these personalities who they are today.

This season, you’ll hear from icons and innovators like Tom Colicchio, Nancy Silverton, Wolfgang Puck, Regé-Jean Page, Claudette Zepeda, Omar Tate and Cybille St. Aude-Tate, Scott Conant, Fermín Núñez, Dr. Arielle Johnson, Paul Carmichael, Arjav Ezekiel, Donna Hay, Ayesha Nurdjaja, Aaron Franklin, Daniel Patterson and Sarah Lewitinn, Patrick O’Connell, Eli Sussman, Tiffanie Barriere, Alex Stupak, Lane Regan, Nina Compton, Lucas Sin, Saqib Keval and Norma Listman, Telly Justice, Hasan Minhaj, Wynonna Judd, Danny Meyer, Eric Ripert, Ina Garten, Ming-Na Wen, Rick Bayless, Hunter Lewis and Erika Adams, Malachy Duffy, and other special guests going deep with host Kat Kinsman on their formative experiences; the dishes and meals that made them; their joys, doubts and dreams; and what’s on the menu in the future. Tune in for a feast that’ll feed your brain and soul — and plenty of wisdom and quotable morsels to savor.

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