With Recognition Comes Responsibility

Dear Pros,

This is Food & Wine's "editor in chef" and Southern Smoke co-founder Chris Shepherd reporting from New York City. On Tuesday, F&W announced the highly anticipated list of 2025 Best New Chefs. Ever since it was established in 1988, this accolade has had a profound impact on the lives of those who are named to it. It brings emerging chefs into the national spotlight and honors the work that got them there. It also prepares them for the road ahead in the food and beverage industry. It is one of the highest honors that a chef can achieve — and it's more than just an award. Best New Chefs is a community of culinary professionals who have helped to transform the foodways of our country. Daniel Boulud, Nancy Silverton, Thomas Keller, Katie Button, David Chang, and 394 others are all part of this elite club, and I am honored to be one of them.

With this recognition comes a lot of responsibility, and it comes at you fast. The accolade might bring more customers to the restaurant, more media inquiries, potential restaurant expansions, brand partnerships, or book deals. It's a lot to handle. This is where the team at Food & Wine comes in to help with the Best New Chef Mentorship program, which helps these young chefs figure out this new landscape and lean into the powerful BNC network to ask questions, get access to other chefs' counsel and resources, and build a community that will grow along with them.

On Tuesday when the 2025 class was announced, the chefs were behind closed doors, getting ready to dive into a morning-long mentorship session where BNC alumni and other industry experts would share insights and answer questions that will help them navigate what’s next.

I'm sharing a few highlights below, and there's more on foodandwine.com.

Untether yourself
"You can't grow if you're tied to the stoves every day. We made a conscious decision early on to step off the line so we could spread modern English cooking to New York. It gave us the chance to create new concepts and gave our team opportunities to grow in their careers rather than being stuck behind us.

If you're going to open a second space, you have to accept that your first one will get a little worse. Even with the best team, once you remove yourself, some of the magic goes away. It won't turn into a bad restaurant, but you'll notice things. You have to decide if you're okay with that in order to grow." — 2023 F&W Best New Chef Ed Szymanski, Dame, Lord's, and Crevette

Enjoy the journey — together
"I want to build teams that can grow with us and eventually open their own restaurants, following the same path we did. And I want to enjoy the journey. The time we cook together in the kitchen is just as important as the time we run a restaurant together. There's no end goal. Even construction can be enjoyable. You want to savor the bad things and the good things so you can enjoy the openings as much as everything else." — 2023 F&W Best New Chef Isabel Coss, Pascual and Lutèce

Protect the assets
"Your brand, your face, and the face of your restaurant are worth more today than they were yesterday. Brands will want to be associated with you. Please don't sign anything without a lawyer looking at it. Contracts can include clauses that give away your name, image, and likeness forever." — Jasmine Moy, restaurant lawyer

You can read even more from the sessions here. With open conversations, we can all make this hard and stressful industry just a little easier to navigate. Take care of each other out there, and don't be shy about asking for help or giving advice when someone needs it.

Also, as editor in chef, I'm the lucky guy who gets to mentor the BNCs as they navigate their first few F&W events like the BNC announcement party and the Food & Wine Classic in Aspen. I'm excited to welcome the 2025 Best New Chefs to Houston on October 4 to cook together for the first time at our Southern Smoke Festival, raising money for crisis relief and mental health support for food and beverage workers.

Tickets are on sale now. Come for the flavors, stay for the cause.
Chris