New American

Five years in, currently sous at Copper Row where I run the pass four nights a week and own the vegetable side of the menu. I trained under two chefs who cooked very differently and I took the useful half of each. My cooking is South Indian at the root — my grandmother's tiffin repertoire — pushed through Texas produce and a lot of live fire. I am looking for a chef de cuisine role in a kitchen that lets me write menus.

I cook the food of the Upper Midwest with a Basque grandmother looking over my shoulder. Eighteen years in professional kitchens took me from a garde manger station in Milwaukee to opening three restaurants in Chicago, and the thing I care about most has not changed: a dining room that feels like somebody's house, with cooking that could only come from this place. At Marrow & Ember we run a live-fire hearth, a small farm program with four growers in Michigan, and a kitchen where every cook rotates through the whole line within a year. I also consult on menu development and kitchen operations for opening teams who want a program that can survive its second year.

Nigerian-American cooking that does not apologise for itself. I run the kitchen at Ìsàlẹ̀ in Bed-Stuy, where we build a nightly tasting menu around West African pantry staples — egusi, iru, smoked catfish, scotch bonnet — using technique I picked up in French kitchens in Manhattan. I came up through fine dining and spent four years wondering why nothing on those menus looked like the food I grew up eating. Ìsàlẹ̀ is the answer to that question.