Thomas Aloysius Keller is an American chef, restaurateur, and cookbook author. He and his landmark Napa Valley restaurant, The French Laundry in Yountville, California, have won multiple awards from the James Beard Foundation, notably the Best California Chef in 1996, and the Best Chef in America in 1997. The restaurant is a perennial winner in the annual Restaurant Magazine list of the Top 50 Restaurants of the World.
Charles Trotter was an American chef and restaurateur. His most well-known restaurant, Charlie Trotter's, was open in Chicago from 1987 to 2012.
Rick Bayless is an American chef and restaurateur who specializes in traditional Mexican cuisine with modern interpretations. He is widely known for his PBS series Mexico: One Plate at a Time. Among his various accolades are a Michelin star, the title of Top Chef Masters, and seven James Beard Awards.
Eric Frank Ripert is a French chef, author, and television personality specializing in modern French cuisine and noted for his work with seafood.
Daniel Boulud is a French chef and restaurateur with restaurants in New York City, Palm Beach, Miami, Toronto, Montréal, Singapore, the Bahamas, the Berkshires and Dubai. He is best known for his eponymous restaurant Daniel, in New York City, which currently holds two Michelin stars.
José Ramón Andrés Puerta is a Washington, D.C.-based, Spanish-American chef and restaurateur. He owns restaurants in several cities around the United States, and has won a number of awards, both for his cooking, and for his humanitarian work. He is a professor and the founder of the Global Food Institute at George Washington University.
Jeremiah Tower is an American celebrity chef who, along with Alice Waters and Wolfgang Puck, has been credited with pioneering the culinary style known as California cuisine. A food lover from childhood, he had no formal culinary education before beginning his career as a chef.
Emeril John Lagassé III is an American celebrity chef, restaurateur, television personality, cookbook author, and National Best Recipe award winner for his "Turkey and Hot Sausage Chili" recipe in 2003. He is a regional James Beard Award winner, known for his mastery of Creole and Cajun cuisine and his self-developed "New New Orleans" style. He is of Portuguese descent on his mother’s side, while being of French heritage through his father.
Laurent Manrique is a French restaurateur and Michelin-starred chef. He currently owns establishments in San Francisco. He was the Corporate Executive Chef of Aqua, an upscale seafood restaurant in San Francisco, where he earned two Michelin stars in 2006, the first time Michelin came to the San Francisco Bay Area, and again in 2007 and 2008. Upon his departure in 2009, the restaurant lost its Michelin status, later closed in 2010. Since 2005, Manrique has owned Café de la Presse.
Richard Michael Tramonto is a Chicago chef and cookbook author. He was executive chef and partner in Tru, a contemporary fine-dining restaurant from Lettuce Entertain You Enterprises.
Chefs A’ Field is an American documentary cooking series broadcast on public television that focuses on the personal stories of farmers, fishermen, foragers and chefs, offering viewers a new way of looking at their food, environment, and community.
Alessandro Stratta is a celebrity chef and restaurateur of mixed Italian and French heritage. Stratta played the role of Iron Chef Italian on the television show Iron Chef USA. He was the recipient of the James Beard Foundation award for Best Chef Southwest in 1998 and was executive chef and owner of his famous namesake restaurant, Alex, in Las Vegas until its closure on January 15, 2011. He was later diagnosed with colon cancer and became a cancer survivor. He was the executive chef and owner of "Tapas by Alex Stratta" in the Las Vegas suburb of Summerlin, until it closed in 2015. In 2016, Stratta became executive chef de cuisine at Prado restaurant at the Omni Hotel in Paradise Valley, Arizona.
Takashi Yagihashi is a Japanese chef, residing in the United States. He specializes in a fusion of French and Asian cuisine.
Mark Peel was an American chef and restaurateur in California. Campanile, a restaurant owned by Peel and his former wife Nancy Silverton, won a James Beard Foundation Award in 2001. Peel specialized in California cuisine and was a pioneer of the farm-to-table concept.
Anthony Amoroso is an Italian-American chef who is a Corporate Executive Chef at BRGuest Hospitality formerly Executive Chef at SeaBlue at The Borgata in Atlantic City, New Jersey and was a winner on the Iron Chef America episode Battle Branzino in 2009.
The first season of the American reality competition show Top Chef Masters was broadcast on Bravo. It is a spin-off of Bravo's hit show Top Chef. In the first season, 24 world-renowned chefs competed against each other in weekly challenges. The program took place in Los Angeles. In the season finale that premiered on August 19, 2009, Rick Bayless was crowned Top Chef Master.
Charlie Palmer is an American chef, hospitality entrepreneur, hotelier, and author. He is best known for Aureole, his flagship restaurant in New York City, which has earned 13 Michelin stars and two James Beard awards. Considered a “pioneer of progressive American cooking,” Palmer has received over 20 Michelin stars and consults 15 F&B outlets through the Charlie Palmer Collective.
The second season of the American reality competition show Top Chef Masters was announced on October 22, 2009. In addition, it was announced that Gail Simmons would be added as a critic. The season premiered on April 7, 2010 with 22 chefs competing against each other in weekly challenges. In the season finale that premiered on June 9, 2010, Marcus Samuelsson was crowned Top Chef Master.
Paul Bartolotta is an American chef and restaurateur. Most recently he is known for his authentic style and his innovative approach to importing fresh seafood from Mediterranean waters. Paul Bartolotta has won the James Beard Foundation Award twice—once for Best Chef: Midwest, and again for Best Chef: Southwest (2009), at Bartolotta, Ristorante di Mare at Wynn Las Vegas. He is a recipient of the Insegna del Ristorante Italiano del Mondo, which was awarded to him in 1997 by Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, the President of Italy at the time.
