There are a multitude of competitions for chefs to enter in the UK, but few (if any) are as prestigious as the Craft Guild of Chefs National Chef of the Year. The list of previous winners reads like a who’s who of the nation’s great chefs – the likes of Luke Selby, Russell Bateman, Alyn Williams, Simon Hulstone, Mark Sargeant, David Everitt-Matthias and Gordon Ramsay have all won in previous years.
Winning, however, is no easy feat – National Chef of the Year may be the most prestigious competition there is for chefs, but it’s also one of the toughest to win. The contest is open to any chef from any industry over the age of twenty-four, so competition is fierce from the get-go. To make it through to the final, you first have to run the gauntlet – entrants are asked to submit an exciting, innovative menu for four people, which is then looked over by a judging panel of some of the country’s most respected chefs led by Gary Jones – executive head chef at Le Manoir aux Quat’Saisons. They have the enviable task of whittling down the entries into forty semi-finalists, who compete across four heats. The winners of each heat go through to the final, along with the next six highest-scoring chefs.
After that, the competition presents its ten finalists. This year’s contest has been as hard-fought as ever, and the finalists come from all corners of the industry. Read on to learn more about each finalist of the Craft Guild of Chefs National Chef of the Year and find out which one of them took the top spot.