Introducing Our 2023 Chefs to Watch!

Plate Magazine

Sep 15

f you’ve been reading Plate over the last year, you might’ve noticed references to our past Chefs to Watch. We realized that after almost 10 years of recognizing up-and-coming chefs, we’ve built up quite the community of industry pros and want to recognize their ongoing leadership and perseverance long after they’ve made the list. Case in point: 2019 Chef to Watch Anthony Strong. He was one of the first chefs I interviewed during the start of the pandemic; we talked about how he was trying to save his San Francisco restaurant by turning it into a general store. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work, but his next two concepts did, as revealed in this issue’s Digestif.

It’s never an easy list to compile, but this year we have a crop of chefs who are not only taking chances on new business ventures, but also seeing their visions through and building communities of their own, all while putting out tremendous food.

I especially loved meeting our cover couple, Ben Lustbader and Sarah Mispagel-Lustbader, who discussed how they left fine dining and brought their mutual vision for an all-day cafe to life at Chicago’s Loaf Lounge in our Chef to Chef, and Laurence Louie, who gave up dreams of cooking in London to take over his mom’s 22-year-old Cantonese bakery in Boston and do his version of a Hong Kong cafe—complete with an oozy and unctuous salted egg custard French toast worth ogling.

Senior Editor Caroline Hatchett discovered how the chefs at Portland, Ore.’s Cafe Olli cracked the code on creating a worker-owned business, and Reid and Sophia Trapani of Atlanta’s La Semilla told Lia Picard what it took to pull off plant-based Cuban food. If a fine-dining Indian restaurant walked into a sports bar, you’d have the white-hot Pijja Palace, where Chef Miles Shorey and Owner Avish Naran collaborated on a concept that brings the best of both worlds (and solidly booked reservations) to L.A. And Seattle’s Yenvy Pham is keeping her family’s business going at The Boat, where she and her sister serve chicken and rice out of her parent’s original phở shop in rapidly gentrifying Little Saigon. “We’re just trying to keep it afloat until the next wave of businesses arrive,” says Pham. “To be the anchor for what’s to come.”

If there’s one thing all of our chefs have in common year after year, it’s expressing the passion, drive, and courage to set down new roots for concepts that come from the heart, and being prepared for whatever comes next. See the full list of this year's chefs below.