Robert William Flay is an American celebrity chef, restaurateur, and reality television personality. Flay is the owner and executive chef of several restaurants and franchises, including Bobby's Burger Palace, Bobby's Burgers, and Amalfi. He has worked with Food Network since 1995, which won him four Daytime Emmy Awards and a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
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.
Lidia Giuliana Matticchio Bastianich is an Italian-American celebrity chef, television host, author, and restaurateur. Specializing in Italian and Italian-American cuisine, Bastianich has been a regular contributor to public television cooking shows since 1998.
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.
Brasserie Les Halles was a French-brasserie-style restaurant located on 15 John Street in Manhattan, New York City. Previous locations were on Park Avenue South in Manhattan, in Tokyo, Miami, and Washington, D.C. Author and television host Anthony Bourdain was the predecessor to the executive chef of Brasserie Les Halles, Carlos Llaguno. The restaurant went bankrupt in August 2017.
Jean Joho is a French-American chef and restaurateur. He was chef and proprietor of Everest in Chicago, Paris Club Bistro & Bar and Studio Paris in Chicago, The Eiffel Tower Restaurant in Las Vegas, and Brasserie JO first in Chicago, then in Boston.
Tiffani Faison is an American celebrity chef and restaurateur. She is based in Boston, has served as a judge on Food Network's television series Chopped, and is a four-time James Beard Award Finalist for Best Chef: Northeast. She was the winner of Season 3 of Tournament of Champions and was named Boston's Best Chef by Boston Magazine in 2022. She was one of two finalists on the first season of Bravo's reality show Top Chef, where she finished second to Harold Dieterle.
The James Beard Foundation Awards are annual awards presented by the James Beard Foundation to recognize chefs, restaurateurs, authors and journalists in the United States. They are scheduled around James Beard's May 5 birthday. The media awards are presented at a dinner in New York City; the chef and restaurant awards were also presented in New York until 2015, when the foundation's annual gala moved to Chicago. Chicago will continue to host the Awards until 2027.
Union Square Cafe is an American restaurant featuring New American cuisine with Italian influences, located at 101 E 19th St, in the Union Square neighborhood of the Manhattan borough of New York City, New York. It is owned by the Union Square Hospitality Group.
Stephanie Izard is an American chef and television personality best known as the first female chef to win Bravo's Top Chef, taking the title during its fourth season. She is the co-owner and executive chef of three award-winning Chicago restaurants, Girl and the Goat, Little Goat, and Duck Duck Goat, and opened her first restaurant, Scylla as chef-owner at the age of 27. Izard received a James Beard Foundation Award for "Best Chef: Great Lakes" in 2013 for her work at Girl and the Goat. She has made a number of appearances on Top Chef since her win, both as a guest judge on subsequent seasons and as a participant in Top Chef Duels. In 2017, Izard competed in the Food Network series Iron Chef Gauntlet, where she overall defeated chefs Bobby Flay, Michael Symon, and Masaharu Morimoto to obtain the title of Iron Chef.
Michel Louis-Marie Richard was a French-born chef, formerly the owner of the restaurant Citrus in Los Angeles and Citronelle and Central in Washington, D.C. He has owned restaurants in Santa Barbara, Tokyo, Carmel, New York City, Atlantic City, Las Vegas, and Washington D.C.
Momofuku is a culinary brand established by chef David Chang in 2004 with the opening of Momofuku Noodle Bar. It includes restaurants in New York City, Toronto, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles, a bakery established by pastry chef Christina Tosi, a bar (Nikai), and a quarterly magazine. The restaurants are notable for their innovative take on cuisine while supporting local, sustainable and responsible farmers and food purveyors.
Pok Pok was a group of Thai restaurants based in Portland, Oregon, founded and led by chef Andy Ricker. Pok Pok won both local recognition and major industry awards, with The Oregonian describing the restaurant as "one of those quintessentially Portland institutions, a sort of rags-to-riches story of the street cart that became a restaurant that became a legend." The main restaurant was located on Southeast Division Street in Portland; with its success Ricker opened satellite locations elsewhere in Portland, and at various times in Brooklyn, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas. Its remaining locations closed in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Lydia Shire is a Boston-based chef and restaurateur.
Wildwood Restaurant and Bar, or simply Wildwood, was a Pacific Northwest and New American restaurant in Portland, Oregon, in the United States. Operating from 1994 to 2014, the restaurant earned owner and founding chef Cory Schreiber a James Beard Foundation Award nomination in the Best Chef: Northwest category. Wendy Culverwell of Portland Business Journal described Wildwood as "a pioneer in the farm-to-table food movement".
Abbi Merriss is an American chef from Indianapolis. She was a James Beard award semifinalist in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019 and in February 2020 received her fifth nomination. Her restaurant, Bluebeard, was nominated for a Beard award for Best New Restaurant in America in 2012. She specializes in New American cuisine.
Berlu is a Vietnamese restaurant and bakery in Portland, Oregon.
Aviary was a restaurant on Alberta Street in northeast Portland, Oregon's Vernon neighborhood, in the United States. Sarah Pliner was a co-owner and head chef.
