By Jonathan Hatchman, Food Editor, @TLE_Food
Following the success of this year’s competition, with Irish chef Mark Moriarty having won the title, S. Pellegrino have announced plans to run another global Young Chef competition for 2016 – an international competition that’s dedicated to finding the best young chef in the world, under the age of 30. For the UK/Ireland regional finals, a judging panel of chefs included the likes of Clare Smyth MBE formerly of Restaurant Gordon Ramsay, Atul Kochhar of Benares, and Duck & Waffle’s Dan Doherty. And having changed for the new competition, the chef judges for 2016’s UK/Ireland final in April will be Claude Bosi, Ollie Dabbous, JP McMahon, and Ross Lewis.
Applications will open on the 1st January 2016 via finedininglovers.com and the competition will then be split into four phases:
Phase One – From 1st January until 31st March 2016, all young chefs will be able to submit their application with their signature dish. Young chefs must be no older than 30 and are required to have at least one year’s experience working in a restaurant as chefs, sous chefs or chefs de partie.
Phase Two – All candidates will be divided into 20 regions (according to their geographic origin) and their applications will be assessed by ALMA – an international training centre for Italian Cuisine. Throughout April, ALMA will select the ten finalists for each region.
Phase Three – The selected ten finalists for each region will move on to the Local Finals, where live competitions will be held locally in each region from 1st May until 15th August. During these events, the area finalists will have to cook their signature dishes for an exclusive regional jury composed of independent top chefs (UK/Ireland’s are listed above) who will taste the dishes and select the winner.
By the end of August, the 20 Best Regional Young Chefs from each world region will be announced as the official finalists. Each finalist will be assigned a Mentor Chef to help them to prepare for the global finals. The UK & Ireland mentor chef will be two Michelin-starred chef and owner of Hibiscus restaurant Claude Bosi.
Phase Four – On 13th October, all Young Chef finalists will gather in Milan for the final phase, which will consist of a two-days intense cooking competition in front of the international panel of judges, that will award the S.Pellegrino Young Chef 2016.
The complete contest regulation and the application form will be available on finedininglovers.com.