Carpaccio

In this elegant starter, superthin, melt-in-your mouth beef tenderloin is seasoned with fruity olive oil and lemon juice and topped with fried capers and rosemary.

This super healthy broccoli salad is topped with a tangy yogurt-based dressing.

Look for the freshest sushi-grade tuna available to make this raw dish.

Like all raw fish dishes, this one is about the quality of the sea bass. Good olive oil is also key: Lokanta Maya’s chef, Didem Senol, uses oil her father presses himself in the south of Turkey (her family picks the olives, too).

In this clever recipe, Jason Stratton of Seattle's Spinasse makes a simple, creamy sauce by simmering toasted pine nuts with lemon zest and chicken stock, then pureeing them. His other smart trick: cooking shrimp on a superhot bed of coarse salt flavored with bay leaves and lemon zest.

Here's a refreshing dessert that looks and tastes spectacular. If you can find one, try a pineapple labeled gold; relatively new to the market, this hybrid is always lusciously sweet.

After Paul Qui won the Top Chef Season 9 title, F&W decided to throw him one more challenge: Create a dish based on four ingredients, including salmon and pork rinds. Turns out, Qui loves pork rinds. “My grandmother cooked everything in pork fat,” he says. “If I was lucky, I got to snack on the rinds she made.” The Top Chef winner used them to make a brilliant crumble for salmon carpaccio (raw fish is a specialty at Uchiko, the Japanese-accented Austin restaurant where he is executive chef). To finish the dish, Qui made a lemon aioli and served it with broccoli rabe.

This beautiful, elegant beet salad gets topped with sweet-and-tangy pickled mustard seeds and a bright horseradish dressing.

Eric Ripert pounds smoked salmon paper-thin, like beef carpaccio, then serves it with brioche and salmon caviar.