Regional Finalists 2022-23

I choose this dish because my mom used to cook this for me and now I cook it for my son. I wan to represent thai heritage dishes in a modern way, to reflect that if the products are treated with love and respect, so the dish will be. I refine the flavours and techniques to elevate it even more, to show the proud heritage of the Thailand ingredients and recipes.

My grandmother is from North Korea. She came down to South Korea during the Korean War. She was a housewife, but also my chef. She cooked a lot of North Korean food. Among them, my favorite was Pheasant dishes. It's a main signature dish that unravels these foods in my own way. My grandmother's cooking for me was a memory and happiness for me. With those memories, I give people happy memories and dishes and my dream is to become a chef. If She was alive, I would like to cook this for her.

My favorite childhood dish is Assam Laksa. To me, the beauty of this dish is the combination of flaky fish melding together with the herbaceous, acidic, spicy, sweet umami broth with nuggets of larger sized fish meat. My version of Assam Laksa utilizes homemade traditional rempah enhanced with fish garum & fish-bone stock & laksa leaf oil with a mosaic made of Kingfish and Farce using the fish trimmings served with Ginger Flower Sorbet and Fish Skin-Yuba Tuile topped w Native Herbs and Salsa.

With this dish, I want my diverse immigrant family background and the fact I do not identify with one food culture, to show what can be done with modern ideas and less. I want to improve myself and develop tight portion control, recipe control, “waste” utilisation, and an insane passion for food. I want to demonstrate my vision of fine dining cooking, which is to cook as local, zero waste, and as ethically as I can while still keeping deliciousness. I want to put food into bellies, not bins.

I invent this plate in honor of the hard work of my father and my mother. My father always work in the cereal world and this is a very hard work. He gives is life to this work to make shure we miss nothing. I also put carrot because when i was young my mother have a big garden with a lot of carrots and i dont really like them at this time. Now this is one of my favorite vegetable. Also the duckling is my favorite animal proteine so that’s why i wan’t to serve them. I hope you let me show you!

Growing up in a multicultural household in Canada exposed me to diverse cuisines, fostering a deep appreciation for Canada's melting pot of cultures. My dish draws inspiration from my favourite childhood dishes, Cantonese braised pork and abalone, and Vietnamese Banh Mi, combined with my time spent in some of Canada's top restaurants, I crafted a dish merging Chinese, European, and Vietnamese flavours. I believe that this fusion embodies Canada's cultural richness on a plate.

Seasonality and regionality play a fundamental role for me when creating my dishes. I want to know where my products come from and how I can use the conditions of my environment for my dishes. Products should find their way onto a plate when they are available on the market in the best quality it can offer. The goal should always be to use the full potential of all products. Often, in the simplicity of the products lies the entire art of cooking.

Tikka Masala - a dish that started my culinary journey. It captivated me as a chef's apprentice with its layers of flavor, the first dish I mastered and the one that won my wife's heart, as the first dish I cooked for her. For this competition, I present it in two ways: whole, to enjoy it fully with all flavours present. But alongside it, a deconstructed version with all elements still present and polished, presented to highlight its individual mastery.

My dish should represent the northern Waldviertel and the history of my family. The idea for my signature dish was born in my head from childhood flavours. But I also want to use it to show sustainability and make a statement that you can still cook an interesting style of cuisine using classic techniques.

This dish gives nobility to the sturgeon by placing it at the centre of the plate, with the caviar playing a secondary role as an accompaniment. I love the idea of pairing the fish with the highly prized egg it produces. Born to two young parents, I grew up between Sologne and Provence; by combining the flavours of Douglass, pine kernels and artichokes, as well as remembering the tian my grandmother used to prepare for me and my love of freshwater fish, I'm showing my origins.

I would like to express my technique and all the skills I have learnt. I've travelled a lot but I'm still connected to Brittany, my home region, even though I've left. I'm very attached to it. Now that I've settled in the Ardèche, my dish represents both, the saltiness of Brittany and the technique of Royans raviole. I'd like to show you that I can present something that is extremely simple at first glance, even though all the fillings in it are complex.

This dish for me represents Irish culture married with classical french techniques,as an Irish chef in France it's something that's very important to me.I break down the elements of the whiskey making process into individual steps, and that utilise those steps to inspire a key ingredient on the plate, all to accompany Irish Beef Tongue."Whiskey loosening the tongue" is an Irish phrase for when we drink whiskey it helps open conversation, I'm playing on that phrase as I braise the beef in whiskey.

The dish tries to capture the work philosophy that characterises me in its maximum expression, for this I base it on a traditional stew from Valencia called "All i pebre", always the cuisine of my territory by flag, but drinking from other cultures to enrich the elaborations, in this case with Mexican influence with the mole, the nixtamalisation as an ancestral technique applied to the current cuisine. In short, this dish conveys tradition from a modern perspective of respect for our roots.

My dish is inspired by the similarities between the foothills of the Chilean Andes and the north of Spain, especially Navarre. The freedom of the Chilean quail and the strength of the bull during the San Fermin festival represent the connection between these two distant lands. With local ingredients that must be used to the maximum, this dish brings me closer to home, allows me to discover its potential and motivates me to represent Chilean gastronomy in Navarra and the whole world.

My favorite part of my childhood is the sea so that was my main inspira tion for this signature dish.I really want to transmite the ocean to everyone who tries the dish, especially because I'm from Viana do Castelo and we have several tradition related to the sea as getting up early and going to the beach to get seafood from the rocks.I remember the first time I tried a sea urchin, 100% sea.I want everyone to feel that flavour, that memory and get to know better Viana do Castelo by this dish.

Growing up in the province of Bergamo with my grandmothers, who were born and raised during the war, they always had the philosophy ‘ the butcher throws nothing away of an animal’. A thought that made me reflect on how many different ways there are to make full use of all that a raw material can offer us. This is why I chose to use a rabbit in its entirety and develop the dish starting with the use of a few kilos of carrots, thus managing to have no waste.

With this dish, I would like to express the concept that the replacement of animal protein with vegetable protein, allows the dish to have an equal taste, thus reducing the environmental impact, being also environmentally friendly. I hope, in this way, to succeed in approaching all food intolerances and pathologies that do not always allow the guest to feel free and involved in the free and varied choice of multiple dishes.

I believe as human being that we are very sick. Imagination and language is what did separated humans from animal.
Today peoples are not conscious of who we really are and the consequence is that we create confusion, trends and bad ego is the protagonist in this planet. Today we try to fix this planet by using one word, sustainability.
who really know the significant of that word and who first went to see inside of the most scary place of this world? I think it is better to start from us...

The chinampas is an efficient and sustainable agricultural system, it is an articulated set of artificial floating islands that were built since pre-Hispanic times. Through this dish, which has been inspired by this ecosystem, using only ingredients that are grown or can be found in this place, applying techniques and preparations of Mexican gastronomy, I seek to highlight the importance of chinampas, the organic products that are grown there and also recognize the hard work of the producer.

Chiriqui's recognized for being the produce pantry of Panama, that’s why my dish's focused on the earth’s bounty with key ingredients of the region. Seren, is a corn soup endemic to the region, with sweet and delicate flavors. My grandmother use the whole corn, from the husk to the cob, because she always says that what the land produces must be used in its entirety. Ubaldina is a homage to her, her heritage, and a journey through my childhood.

A fufu portrait is the story of the Riquelme’s, my family from my mother’s side. In all our gatherings we’ll come together around this delicious soup made from fish head, coconut milk, curry, and root vegetables. Why just the head? Because the rest of the fish we pickled it in our family’s escobish.
As a kid, it was beautiful to see all my aunts having fun around those pots trying to feed a battalion. For me fufu and escobish represent the strong bond between my kin and the roots of my people.

I advocate, “to make full use of all things and sustainable ingredients."

I selected the specialty ingredient "Yanchi Tan Sheep" from Ningxia, China and local wild leek flowers. Using Chinese and Western fusion cuisine techniques to cook the lamb chops, lamb loin, lamb bones, internal organs and other parts combined with local flavours to form the flavour profile of the final dish. Puna series mineral water is used to cook the Yanchi Tan sheep, this is also the water that the sheep grew up drinking.

When making sauce and stock, I used the stock from making “lamb wrapped with lamb belly” combined with a sauce made from lamb bones. During cooking, kitchen utensils such as wide-mouth pots and pressure cooker are used to reduce the cooking time and to achieve the reduction of carbon emissions, and sustainability of ingredients. Geographical specialty product "Yanchi Tan Sheep" is selected with the intention to be the guardian of pure bloodlines, and to promote all over China and onward to the world.
 

For me, the meat of the turbot fish is tender and not fishy, and it often appears on every household's dining table. The common cooking methods include steaming, braising, pan-frying, and more. Although it is a very common fish, I want to try to create a unique experience based on my own understanding. Furthermore, it seems that the concept of "numbing and spicy" is not widely known internationally. I hope to introduce the concept and let more people understand the charm of Chinese cuisine and the unique flavors it offers

Inspired by the first book of traditional Chinese medicine, "Huangdi Neijing," which states that food is food when eaten on an empty stomach, but medicine when consumed by patients, I have chosen medicinal herbs such as Poria cocos, japonica rice, Gastrodia elata, and Phyllanthus emblica as the main ingredients, complemented by traditional handcrafted tea. This has led to the creation of a pure vegetarian dish, embodying the concept of food and medicine sharing the same origin.

With this dish, I want to show that worldly flavors can be achieved with products from our own country or region, promoting sustainability and supporting local farmers and suppliers. This dish is entirely based on vegetables and fruits, and contains no animal products. By doing this, we challenge ourselves and demonstrate that the same flavors can be achieved without using animal ingredients.

This dish focuses on solder fish which is one of the largest food sources for many fish species in the ocean. also that is hardly used in our gastronomic. more focused on Nordic ingredients and history with a mix of classic and modern cooking techniques.

Coming from an island, I strived to do products from there, representing the producers I grew up with. This dish combines products from different social rank (mackerel-langoustine). Some are my background, modest countryside, some are my present ‘palace cuisine’. Married together, proves that there is no rules. Everything can be good. There is no straightforward path — that embodies my life. It is also the style of cuisine I aim to go to: not having anything fixed or pre-decided.

The inspiration behind this dish is the imagery of the sun reflecting on the gentle ocean waves.
The sunlight and delicate sea foam cast marbled shadows on the sand dunes below.
In the shallow waters of the sea floor, the turbot camouflages itself in the rippled shadows, swimming between the dancing seaweed, like curtains of a theatre.
The potato being the roots of the land completes the dish by complementing the flavour of the turbot and seaweed, but emulating the delicate fins of this Fish.

The story of the dish tells my story with the cuisine. I use a culinary technique from each chef I have worked with, while adding my personal touch that I associate with the products of my native country. Which gives a textured dish, full of color with this full-bodied, powerful, fragrant juice which gives character to the dish. This dish testifies to my love for my profession, the ups, and downs, the sacrifices I have had to make for the sole purpose of living my passion.

I was born and raised in Sichuan, China. With my professional training from Le Cordon Bleu in Australia, I found Australia can be a bridge of combination of two completely different flavours and cultures. I have considered South Australia as my second home, and I love the wide range of fresh ingredients and indigenous products. I want to bring the authentic Sichuanese flavour to South Australia and create my own food style inspired by modern western cuisine in the short future.

As a young Israeli chef, I believe deeply in the principles of zero waste and seasonal cuisine. These beliefs not only guide my culinary work but also reflect my commitment to sharing and respecting the natural world. My dish, "Pumpkin, Spice & Everything Nice", is a testament to these values,  combining tradition, innovation and responsible cooking.

‘Aljotta’ is a traditional Maltese tomato-based fish broth soup. My dish comprises of homely traditional flavours, in part with a little twist and in the other a more technical and modern to it. The importance is ultimately the flavour of the original ‘Aljotta’; as to impart my childhood memory of my first fishing boat trip, which also was the first time eating the soup. It is also a small taste of Malta, our history and the deliciousness in the simplicity of our cooking.

The dish is an ode to my hometown Acre, a mixed city of Jews & Arabs, located by the Sea. I Combine haute cooking techniques and local ingredients with classic Jewish recipes, creating a fusion that reflects my hope for peace in our region. I’m using blue crab as the main ingredient, an invasive local species. Diluting it, helps to the restoration of the local maritime ecosystem. It’s presented in the dish in 4 ways, expressing zero waste and Nose to Tail principles with local ingredients.

I want to showcase everything I have learnt as a chef so far. I think doing a classical dish like this is unique and modern. It really shows how different styles and cuisines have evolved. This really expresses how far food has come and how far i have come as a chef.

This dish is all about a recreation of a happy memory growing up and getting a nostalgic feeling. Cooking and food to me is all about a mixture of new discovery and connecting to a different place, a different time, a memory, a feeling. When I was growing up my mother would take me to my nanny's place and she would always be in the kitchen making something. Two standout dishes I remember always helping her with were her Veranicki's which are a Russian perogy and borscht. We would sit for hours chopping vegetables, stuffing veranickis, and spending time together at her table. The recipe for the dough is her fathers recipe and I wanted to do a bit of a modern take on the classic dough and by adding elements of borscht through dill, beetroots, and creme fraiche throughout the dish. The duck parts of the dish are a more recent memory of moving half way around the world to come work in London at The Ritz Hotel. One of the most memorable dish's that we serve at The Ritz is the Duck a la Presse. The theater and level of service makes this more than just a dish, but creates an everlasting memory to anyone who would order it. Even the people around would remember it, it's so special.

This is the dish that I first wrote down 4 years ago when I was planning to do my first ever pop up, which unfortunatelly for one reason on another I never got round to do. Now revisiting it with different techniques that I've learned along the way I'd hope to be able to present to you a well balanced and complete plate. I chose the flovours of celeriac and apple becuase I think the combination is delicious. I'd like to express how delicious vegetables can be.

Through this dish, I aim to express a harmony of flavors and cultures, celebrating the versatility and richness of plant-based ingredients. The blend of beet root with lactofermented strawberries and blueberries highlights the art of fermentation, an age-old preservation technique. The spices, wine, and agave syrup reflect a fusion of global culinary traditions. Accompanied by the refreshing tomato water and the vibrant foam made of fermented fruits, An example of my culinary identity.

The pairings of squid & date and oyster tofu & bone expresses a yearning for a unified Korea. My father's family was forced from their home north of the 38th parallel to escape invading communist forces during the war. They arrived in the southern port city of Busan as strangers in their own land. This dish aims to harmonize the flavors of our ancestral home in the north of Korea with the textures and ingredients of the south in efforts to to tell our family's story and chart our migration.

This dish represents my love for classic techniques and exploring new flavors while minimizing waste and creating a unique dining experience. I fell in love with Country Ham while living in Charleston, but we never had a good use for all the scraps. Substituting the Country Ham scraps for the more classic dried shrimp or scallops creates a slightly smokier XO that bridges Chinese cuisine and the American South, which is important to me- bridging gaps between cultures through food.

The first message this dish gets across is a bit of a surprise to most people who taste it as even a simple lettuce plant, if well prepared, can become the tastiest dish on the menu. historically it has no specification, but another important message this dish gets across is definitely that of using all parts of a product, from a to z, from the cooking liquid that becomes a vinaigrette to the daikon waste that becomes kimchi.

Through this vegetable dish, the idea is to show that a simple product can become a complex and flavorful dish on its own. You can get a range of different flavors and textures through lacto, cooking, or the combination of products.

My dish embodies simplicity, honesty, and refinement with three core ingredients: mackerel, dulse, and shiitake. Inspired by my parents' bakery, where simplicity was prized, I aimed to create a refined meal with minimalism at its core. Sustainability was crucial; I sourced locally from Belgium, minimizing the food supply chain and using all by-products to reduce waste. This dish reflects both my culinary ethos and dedication to sustainable practices.