Regional Finalists 2022-23

I would like to express familiar flavors through this dish — flavors I used to enjoy during my childhood. As time passed, I could no longer find this dish or experience it in the same way again, but I still clearly remember its taste and the feelings connected to it. Through this dish, I want to recreate those memories and pay tribute to one of my favorite childhood meals.

Through this dish, I express Japan’s Satoyama culture, a way of life rooted in the coexistence of people and nature. Festivals, prayers for abundant harvests, care for the environments that provide food, and cooperation within rural communities are values deeply embedded in Japanese society. As a chef, I believe cuisine must begin with an awareness of the ecosystems that sustain our ingredients. Satoyama is a philosophy I wish to share with the world and a model for the future of cooking.

What I would like to express through this dish is Thai culture, is blended with French because I want to bring Thai food that people eat every day to make it look more exotic and delicious. mixed with the French cuisine that I'm working on.

Home Between Two Shores reflects the chef I am today and the one I hope to become. Growing up on the Mediterranean coast of Türkiye taught me that food is memory, identity, and connection. Through lamb and mussels, I bring together the land and sea that shaped me. Inspired by my grandparents, my father, and the journey that brought me back home, this dish expresses my belief that food can preserve heritage, create belonging, and bring people together around a shared table.

The Shepherd offers his healthiest lambs, either for feasts or as a sacrificial meal every year by monotheists alike, in suit of Abraham's sacrifice to god. It is tradition to use a healthy lamb that is at least a year old. I wanted to honour this abiding tradition by encompassing the subtle yet rich flavours of the animal, complimented with locally foraged seasonal vegetables. This is an exploration of a harmonious dance of textures, temperatures, and flavours.

This dish is my brainchild of what my soul would look like on a plate, the mousse of the Meat Beliram is a connection to my roots in Punjab and also how I made the move to Canada by packing just my knives and my clothes. The eel is one of the first ingredients I fell in love with. The morels are the abundant wilderness of Canada and the sauce and kachori lend the child in me with flavor's which I grew up as a child, never wanting to be a chef but later loving every bit of it.

With this dish I would like to express that we all have to look back sometimes when we were young and our families were cooking for us.
This dish I devote both my Grandmothers. One of them came from the Northern part of Germany that stands for the Sea part of the dish and the other Grandma came from the West part of Germany and she had a big homegrown garden. I gather two types of living and put my identity as a chef on top thus it became my Signature Dish.

In this dish I want to give a stage to an ingredient that I think is underestimated (the horse) and represent it as much as possible. I take the food of the horse, the so-called soft food and complement with it parts of the animal to present the whole. I want this animal to be culinary understood from beginning to end.

This Dish is my Handwriting, it is all the experiences I collected over the years in every kitchen I worked, starting from what my mother cooked for me when I was a child. My Grandma created many dishes with offals, and that was the inspiration for my ragout. I Love to make some old traditional dishes in a new modern way with a touch of Asian style.

I see cuisine as a means of transmission. It brings pleasure while questioning our relationship with living things. This dish embodies that belief. The Grise du Vercors, a breed preserved from standardisation, is used in its entirety. Guided by phronesis, I seek thoughtful choices rooted in its terroir. Each element conveys a simple idea: value lies in what we choose to preserve, despite time and constraints.

My dish resembles how climate change has affected the planet, both land and sea in the Mediterranean Regions. It’s a pescatarian dish, a combination of the French culture where I live now and the culture of Cyprus where I come from. We, as the new generation of chefs must enlighten ourselves and teach people wisely through our cooking how climate change has affected us, the nature and all the species of the planet and how to start respecting nature and her resources.

I learned to respect nature and its ingredients from my grandmothers. In their kitchen, waste was minimal and every flavor was honest and true. That philosophy shaped my roots, and those flavors inspire A Rabbit Walking Around the Mountains. I see myself in a carefully tended garden and in the work of local producers, thoughtfully chosen, whose dedication gives my cuisine its deepest connection to the land. Everything rests on attention to to detail and rigorous, passionate technique.

I would like to express the evolution of nuances and flavours that develops in cold-ripened sea bass without humidity. The maturation of pork pieces is a technique widely used in our area, it is carried out in the winter months in order to take advantage of the dry cold. The impediment of having fresh fish available on a daily basis has led us to implement this technique and adapt it in the restaurant to achieve a regularity in quality and a product with a great complexity of flavour and nuances.

This dish symbolizes the respect and love that I have to the culture that gave me all the techniques and knowledge that I have today; always adding my little personal touch from Mexico. It is a plate with different elaborations, techniques, flavors, traditions and creativity. It truly shows the kind of chef I have become. Besides it was thought with the philosophy of circular cooking and sustainability. In the future I want to be an example to all the future women entering the gastronomic world.

With this signature dish I intend to elevate the octopus to its maximum using all parts of it, without any waste. The place where I work, in Tavira, octopus is one of the great treasures that exists, and I intend to make it shine!

The dish is the result of a creative process that gives new life to discarded glass fragments, reassembled in a symphony of transparent shapes and colours. The artichoke becomes the protagonist, accompanied by fleshy elements that enhance its intensity without overpowering it, here the meat accompanies the vegetables, not the other way around. A zero-waste vision, this applies to materials as much as to food. The ferrosity of the heart accompanied by the butter mousse complete the artichoke's honesty and freshness.

My "Ossi di seppia" draws inspiration from Montale's work, where bones, wandering among the waves and seemingly worthless, symbolize a miserable yet significant existential condition. Like the small things in daily life, they conceal intrinsic value and beauty. By using every part of the cuttlefish, even those considered scraps, I aim to showcase their importance and convey the significance of circular cooking to reduce waste and valorise each ingredient.

'Mappina' is a salad typical of the province of Cosenza. In Le ricette regionali italiane (1967), Anna Gosetti della Salda writes: “Take several lettuce hearts, wash them thoroughly, drain them and place them in a bowl; sprinkle them with small pieces of garlic and chilli pepper, salt and a little oil. Place a weight on top of the salad and leave it like this for two or three days in the refrigerator…” (p. 947). This historic recipe provides the starting point for an entirely plant-based narrative rooted in the flavors and traditions of Southern Italy.

With this dish, I aim to express the essence and authenticity of seafood from the Pacific coast, especially in Chile. My intention is to tell a story of respect for the sea and its resources, highlighting the freshness and quality of local ingredients. My goal is to capture the freshness and unique flavor of these ingredients, emphasizing the culinary tradition and art that surrounds them.

The dish I have created has two main purposes. First of all, it conveys my identity. Throughout my years living in different Latin American countries I have created a deep immersion in several cultures and cuisines. This dish contains preparations and ingredients of my home country, but has great influence of the cultures I have gratefully come to call my own. Lastly I decided to represent the stingray. A beautiful and rich protein of humble origins that deserves a spotlight in high gastronomy.

Punta Hermosa is my home, where my father taught me to read waves and honor the ocean, shaping my identity through Peruvian biodiversity and Italian heritage into my cooking. Today, seeing bottom trawling devastate our sea breaks my heart. This dish is an emotional wake-up call, a zero-waste creation that brings my childhood to the table. It connects my history to an urgent mission: inspiring people to protect the Peruvian sea that gives us everything, the same sea woven into my identity.

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

This dish is my tribute to traditional Huaiyang cuisine, interpreted through the culinary language I know best. As a Western chef, I combine Chinese techniques and heritage with familiar Western methods, from consommé clarification to risotto emulsification and ballotine. Rather than reinventing tradition, I aim to create a respectful dialogue between cultures, showing that curiosity and craftsmanship can bring new vitality to classic flavours.

Through this dish, I want to bring the focus back to cooking itself. We live in a time where everything becomes an image very quickly, and food is often judged by how it looks before people even taste it. For me, a dish should first be delicious, warm and satisfying. The picture is important, but eating matters more. I have put my memories, my background, and the way I understand food into this dish. I hope it can remind young chefs to come back to flavour, technique, aroma and cooking.

The idea behind the dish is to connect the Bulgarian and Nordic cuisine through common ingredients and procedures. The lamb is common for Bulgaria in Easter and this is written deep into the culture. The piece is either cooked on open fire or braised for long hours, and this is why I use both techniques to represent the original way of cooking lamb, from back in the days. The garnishes representing modern way salad, done by my grandmother, as well as flavorful, creamy fricassee served back home.

I'm from Lapland, where reindeer is a big part of the culture. With my signature dish, I want to show how diverse and wonderful meat reindeer is and combine it with international flavors. I lived in Lebanon for a year and wanted to bring flavors inspired by the Middle East alongside northern flavors. The dish is inspired by the mindscape of smoke over the swamp filled with berries, mixed with the scents of heather and angelica. At the end of the landscape stands a reindeer on the forest's edge.

During my time spent at Faroe Islands I create this dish with one purpose, to make something Mexican inspired but allowing myself to do it only with local resources but still following the tradition of my culture, and way of cooking.

Adapting a classic street dish like “ceviche and tostadas” to a more defined and detailed idea with technique behind and a mix of ingredients from both cultures.

I think food on these days is about adapting, connecting and evolving like all humans.

My passion and mindset when creating new dishes is to create something remarkable, to accept the challenge and always being out of the comfort zone. I am personally not Vegan or Vegetarian, however I believe fruits and vegetables deserve the same respect during preparation as proteins. My guiding principles in creating this dish where to, first, create a play of different temperatures, textures, and flavours and, secondly, have a clear line, structure, and complexity.

This dish is called Analogy from the river. The concept is an accumulation of values and experiences I have as a chef. This dish is my expression of my ethnicity on a plate. I intend to integrate applications of tradition and how it can stay resilient despite my migration to the other side of the world. I embrace this because this is what inspires me to visualize the futures potential to sustain life’s practices more than just the gastronomy.

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.

With this dish I want to see how far I can go using very few elements. One piece of turbot, one circle of sorrel and two small garnishes are arranged almost like a diagram, but the flavours are intense, acidic and slightly fermented. My goal is to cook with restraint: to strip away decoration, focus on structure and texture, and learn to say more by putting less on the plate.

My dish is my interpretation to the classic Borscht. I took my mother’s recipe and disassembled it and combined it with the local ingredients and flavor’s. The dish itself served on plates that passed in my family in inheritance.
My goal was to make a dish that combines two cultures, memories from my childhood and also has minimum waste. I tried to use all the parts of all the ingredients.

Serbia is land of contrasts. Its people know hardship, difficult soil, and scarity - but they also know pride. From struggle comes something almost irrational: Uncoditional Hospitality. When guests arrive, poverty disappears. Everything is placed on the table, and family gathers around it. And there is always Šopska salad. This dish has long surpassed the form of salad. It is prose about people, hardship, and defiance. The salad is no longer left in the corner. Now, it stands in front of you.

My dish is a take on the classic Spanish Suquet, it being the first dish I learnt to prepare. I grew up in India, a country defined by it’s food, but, as a chef, I have always tried not to be defined by my background. Working with traditional Spanish cuisine is inspiring me to believe that food should represent a chef rather than being confined to the expectations of what a cuisine should be. I have chosen to elevate a traditional dish, with elements inspired by my heritage.

A Chef is someone able to forge a connection between times and who can intertwine the strings of time to create something beautiful. Food is central to our sense of identity. The way any given human group eats helps it assert its diversity, hierarchy and organisation, but also, at the same time, both its oneness and the otherness of whoever eats differently. I wanted to create a dish that reflects my background who couldn't think i would love pigeon.

The chosen fish for this dish is halibut, a firm fish with an oily texture. I have made a special sauce called fish caramel made from halibut bones with a good amount of sauce and nice creamy cauliflower puree with vanilla, blended until smooth. The lemon gel next to it gives a nice acidity for freshness in the dish. Along side we have New Zealand mussels grilled with butter halibut cheeks tartare with kohlrobi and fried kohlrobi leaves. Simple and tasty to enjoy!

“Pozole or Chawanmushi...?” reflects my journey as a chef. Through pozole, corn, and Japanese technique, I express where I come from in Mexico, the kitchens that shaped me, and the direction of my career. The dish blends memory, discipline, and creativity into one experience, honoring tradition while exploring a more personal and modern culinary identity.

I want to express the courage to work with nonconformity, taking a classic plate form my country with products that we barely use and remade it with new techniques and thoughts but keeping the amazing flavor of the main components so you can transport yourself to Catalunya.
The message is to bring back the forgotten classics and the story behind them.

This dish is a walk through the garden — every part of the bird used, every element drawn from the land around it. It is rooted in years spent at The Chef's Garden in Ohio, where I learned that nothing is waste and everything has flavor. The whole bird mirrors the whole plant: nothing discarded, everything transformed. I want the person eating this dish to feel the same wonder I felt walking those rows — that food, at its best, is an act of attention.

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.

This dish reflects my journey from Taiwan to a multicultural culinary world. Inspired by Taiwan’s tradition of pairing flavors from the sea and the land. It is shaped by Korean respect for fermentation, Italian ingredient-led cooking, and Australian charcoal grilling. Today, I cook to share stories of identity and cultural exchange. In the future, I hope to create tables where food sparks conversation, creates memories, and gives travelers a taste of home.

My cuisine champions a respectful approach to ingredients and local producers. I seek to make the most of every part of the animal to reduce waste and pass on genuine culinary knowledge. Through this dish centered on pigeon, mushrooms and potato, I want diners to experience the flavors of a Belgian autumn and enjoy a vibrant tasting journey designed to showcase each preparation and tell a story over the course of the meal – all with sincerity and a spirit of sharing.