Year's Best: Best New Chefs Recipes

By Food & Wine
Updated May 24, 2017
From ricotta pancakes with orange syrup to jumbo brownies, here are our favorite offerings from this year's Best New Chefs.
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Foie Gras-Steamed Clams

Credit: © Anna Williams
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At the Greenhouse Tavern in Cleveland, Jonathon Sawyer uses a little bit of foie gras to create a luscious sauce for clams. "It's such a simple recipe," he says. "I just put the clams, foie gras and vinegar in a pot and just let them get to know each other for a while."

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Green Tomatoes with Pistachio Relish

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Relishes typically contain cooked and pickled vegetables; the one here is mouth-tinglingly tangy. James Syhabout of Oakland, California's Commis makes it by pickling shallots, capers, pistachios and pink peppercorns overnight in Champagne vinegar and olive oil. It's awesome on tomatoes, but he also likes using it on fish.

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Grilled Green Bean Salad with Lentil Vinaigrette

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Most cooks boil, steam or sauté green beans, but grilling them—as Alex Seidel of Denver's Fruition does here—gives them a delicious char that's superb with the lentils, pancetta and baked tomatoes in this salad.

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Midnight Tortas

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Kogi chef Roy Choi's gift to Los Angeles's late-night partiers. The over-the-top combination of fried eggs, spinach, pork belly and roasted jalapeños is a little Mexican and a little Asian—a uniquely Choi hybrid.

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The Breslin's Ricotta Pancakes with Orange Syrup

Credit: © Lucy Schaeffer
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Guests at Ace Hotel can order April Bloomfield's pancakes in their rooms or at her restaurant, The Breslin. While the pancakes are delicious on their own, they're exquisite with the soft ricotta topping, crunchy sliced almonds and ingeniously vibrant (and neon-bright) orange syrup.

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Grilled Squid and Torpedo Onions with Sorrel

Credit: © Anna Williams
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For this unexpectedly fun dish, Matt Lightner of Castagna in Portland, Oregon, tosses grilled torpedo onions (a sweet heirloom variety from Italy) with grilled squid bodies. Since the onions and the squid resemble each other so much in color and shape, each bite is a small surprise.

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Salmon with Cantaloupe and Fried Shallots

Credit: © Anna Williams
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John Shields of Town House in the small town of Chilhowie, Virginia, composed this dish from ingredients he picked up at his local supermarket. The magic is in the play of textures and flavors: The salmon skin and shallots—both potato-chip crisp— are wonderful with the tender, flaky fish and sweet pieces of melon.

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Hush Puppies with Green Zebra Tomato Jam

Credit: PHOTO © ANNA WILLIAMS
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At Trummer's on Main in Clifton, Virginia, Clayton Miller makes a highly seasoned, Indian-inflected tomato jam with ginger, cinnamon, cumin and cayenne. It's a terrific accompaniment to his hush puppies—cheekily nicknamed "shut-your-piehole puppies" by the cooks in his kitchen.

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Jumbo Brownies

Credit: © Stephanie Foley
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"Like all great desserts," says Anne Quatrano, "these brownies have only three pertinent flavors: chocolate, butter and walnuts." Quatrano, an F&W Best New Chef 1995, is the chef of a small empire of restaurants in Atlanta.

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10 of 10

Zucchini Carpaccio with Salt-Broiled Shrimp

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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.

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