Iliana de la Vega is a Mexican-born American chef and restaurateur who won the 2022 James Beard Best Chef in Texas Award. [1] [2] [3] In 2019, she was a semifinalist for the Best Chef Southwest award. [4]
The Mexican Government gave her the Ohtli Award in 2014. [1]
De La Vega grew up in Mexico City. [3]
She moved to her mother's hometown of Oaxaca in 1997 where she opened El Naranjo. In 2012, she opened a location in Austin, Texas. [3]
De La Vega served as the Mexican/Latin Cuisines Specialist for the Culinary Institute of America [1] from 2007 until 2012. [4] At the San Antonio campus, “she conducted research, developed curricula and taught undergraduate, graduate and continuing education courses on Mexican and other Latin cuisines while creating and launching the Latin Cuisines Certificate Program.” [5]
With her daughter Isabel, she began Mexican Culinary Traditions which offers cooking classes and guided tours. [6]
Diana Kennedy was a British food writer. The preeminent English-language authority on Mexican cuisine, Kennedy was known for her nine books on the subject, including The Cuisines of Mexico, which changed how Americans view Mexican cuisine. Her cookbooks are based on her fifty years of travelling in Mexico, interviewing and learning from several types of cooks from virtually every region of the nation.
Wolfgang Johannes Puck is an Austrian chef and restaurateur.
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, and Dubai. He is best known for his eponymous restaurant Daniel, opened in New York City in 1993, which currently holds two Michelin stars.
José Ramón Andrés Puerta is a Spanish-American chef and restaurateur. Born in Spain, he moved to the United States in the early 1990s and since then, he has opened restaurants in several American cities. He has won a number of awards, both for his cooking, and his humanitarian work. He is a professor as well as the founder of the Global Food Institute at George Washington University.
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.
Susan Feniger is an American chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, and radio and TV personality. She is known for starring in the cooking show Too Hot Tamales on the Food Network and opening several influential restaurants in Los Angeles. She has been awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award by the California Restaurant Association.
Mary Sue Milliken is an American chef, restaurateur, cookbook author, and radio and TV personality with a focus on Latin cuisine in the United States.
Tanya Holland is an American celebrity chef, restaurateur, podcast host, writer, and cookbook author. She is known as an expert of soul food. Holland is an alumna of Bravo TV's Top Chef, where she competed on the 15th season. She was the owner of Brown Sugar Kitchen in Oakland, California, which received national recognition and multiple Michelin Bib Gourmand awards.
El Bajío is a group of eighteen restaurants in Mexico City which are run by Carmen Ramírez Degollado, noted for their colorful decoration and traditional cuisine from central Mexico which has received awards and praise from notable food experts. The restaurant business began in 1972 when Carmen's husband Raúl Ramírez Degollado bought a restaurant selling carnitas in the northwestern borough of Azcapotzalco. Four years later, Raúl died and Carmen took over the business, expanding the menu and adding waiters. The restaurant was so successful that she was able to send her five children to private university. In 2006, El Bajío opened a second location in the center of the city and since then has grown to eighteen locations which serve about 120,000 diners a month. Carmen has become a notable chef in her own right, giving classes and demonstrations in Mexico and abroad as well as writing about 20 books.
Carmen Ramírez Degollado is an internationally recognized expert on traditional Mexican food, head of the El Bajío restaurants located in Mexico City. She grew up in the rural area of Xalapa, Veracruz with no intentions of becoming a restaurateur. However, when her husband died in 1981, she took over the restaurant he founded and expanded it adding dishes from her native Veracruz and other Mexican states along with the carnitas and barbacoa that he made. Carmen’s international recognition began when she accompanied her daughter who went abroad to study to become a professional chef. This led to classes, consulting and participation in gastronomic events principally in the United States and Europe.
Michael Solomonov is an Israeli chef known for his restaurants in Center City, Philadelphia. His first restaurant Zahav, founded in 2008, has received national recognition including the James Beard Foundation "Outstanding Restaurant" in 2019. Solomonov was also awarded Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic in 2011, Cookbook of the Year in 2016, and Outstanding Chef in 2017 from the James Beard Foundation. In 2021, The New York Times named his restaurant Laser Wolf as one of "the 50 places in America we're most excited about right now."
Patricia Jinich is a Mexican chef, TV personality, cookbook author, educator, and food writer. She is best known for her James Beard Award-winning and Emmy-nominated public television series Pati's Mexican Table. Her first cookbook, also titled Pati's Mexican Table, was published in March 2013, her second cookbook, Mexican Today, was published in April 2016, and her third cookbook, Treasures of the Mexican Table, was published in November 2021.
Gregory Gourdet is an American chef, writer, restaurateur, and former finalist on the twelfth and seventeenth seasons of Bravo's American reality television series, Top Chef. He is of Haitian descent. He is the owner of the restaurant Kann and the former executive chef and culinary director of Departure at The Nines in Portland, Oregon. His book, Everyone’s Table: Global Recipes for Modern Health, is a national bestseller.
Ashleigh Shanti is an American chef and sommelier. She is a freelance chef. Shanti specializes in African American foodways, including Black Appalachian cuisine. From 2018 until 2020 she was the chef de cuisine of Benne on Eagle in Asheville, North Carolina.
Mei Lin is a Chinese-born American chef and television personality, best known as the winner of the twelfth season of the Bravo television network's reality television series, Top Chef. After winning Top Chef in 2014, Lin worked as a personal chef for Oprah Winfrey before going on to open her first restaurant, Nightshade in Los Angeles in 2019. She became engaged to her fiancé Andrew Skala on January 14, 2023. On April 9, 2023, Lin won the fourth season of Food Network's Tournament of Champions.
The James Beard Foundation Awards are annual awards presented by the James Beard Foundation to recognize culinary professionals in the United States. The awards recognize chefs, restaurateurs, authors and journalists each year, and are generally scheduled around James Beard's May birthday.
Hugo Ildefonso Ortega is a Mexican-born American chef, cookbook author and 2017 James Beard Award winner for Best Chef: Southwest.
Ana Liz Pulido is a Mexican-American chef and restaurateur. In 2024 she won the James Beard Foundation Award for Best Chef: Texas.