If You Could Cook Like Any Chef, Who Would It Be?

Dear Pros,

You've got Kat this week, reporting from cloud nine because I got to spend time talking with Nancy Silverton. The 1990 F&W Best New Chef and 2026 Time 100 honoree was my guest on the most recent episode of Tinfoil Swans, and in her generous Nancy fashion, held nothing back. She spoke openly about feeling like an impostor even after decades of success, an altitude-related pastry mishap that still haunts her, and the mistakes she'd like to see young chefs avoid, like cooking for photographs rather than for diners.

She'll be speaking about this more on the inaugural Best New Chefs stage at the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen, so if you haven't yet gotten your passes, you've got (glances at calendar) only 41 days to get on that.

One of my favorite parts was getting to tell Nancy that our editor in chief, Hunter Lewis, spontaneously told me that if he could cook or think like any chef, it would be her. "Nancy is kind of a culinary Wonder Woman. She can cook anything," he wrote on Slack. "Bobby Flay once told me something similar, recalling the way she tore bread crumbs to create craggier edges for croutons."

I haven't stopped thinking about this — or asking friends, colleagues, and food-loving people in my life whose kitchen clogs they'd like to step into for a day.

For me, it's Claudia Fleming, the pioneering pastry chef at Gramercy Tavern, now Executive Pastry Director for Union Square Hospitality Group. She's an artist to the core, girded by the steely discipline of her ballet background. There's whimsy, joy, and pleasure in every crumb of her creations. Claudia, ideates, researches, and relentlessly tests every single element of a dish until she deems it ready to serve — and then she still keeps tinkering. That meld of creativity and restlessness is catnip to me. Funnily enough, as I was typing this, a push notification came through from my Daily Provisions app, almost as if it could sense my bone-deep need for one of her yuzu crullers.

And for our restaurant editor, Erika Adams, that center of gravity is Samin Nosrat — for similar reasons to my Claudia Fleming pick. Also, she said via Slack, "If I were opening a restaurant and really going for it, I'd love to have a Wylie Dufresne brain."

I get all of these selections. All four chefs possess boundless imagination, backed by a drive to bring these ideas to life in their ideal form. There's an unrest that appeals to me, as a person whose mind is always itching for the next project, but never quite satisfied with what I've already done.

Pros, if you could cook or think like any one chef, who would that be and why? Email me your thoughts at the address below, and while you're at it, queue up Tinfoil Swans on your favorite podcast app. All of these chefs have been guests on the show, and I hope you will enjoy spending time in their delicious worlds as much as I did.

Be well,
Kat