Meet the Next Generation of Power Players in American Fine Dining

There are plenty of Top Chef alums around America operating successful restaurants, but you won’t find many cheftestants from Top Chef France plying their trade stateside. Such is the case with Alexia Duchêne, who arrived on our shores just a few years ago and has already made quite the impression on the New York food scene. Earlier this decade, she was still in Paris, earning raves for her restaurant Datsha Underground after she’d made it to the semifinals of Gallic Top Chef in 2019. But she eventually moved to America, telling The New York Times that she was partly driven by the challenges of turning a profit in Europe. With her husband Ronan Duchêne Le May, she opened La Chêne in the West Village last year serving a luxe and indulgent old-school French restaurant serving pithiviers and côte de boeufs atop tables cloaked in crisp white linens. Her lean into luxury is winning over diners in the Big Apple.

After growing up in the Northeast, graduating from the New England Culinary Institute, and working in Boston kitchens, chef Brian Limoges ventured west to hone his craft in some of the San Francisco’s most celebrated restaurants. He had stints in Atelier Crenn, Quince, and Birdsong, before working for Simon Rogan in England and returning to the Bay to take a corporate chef gig for Saison Group. He was tapped by Mac and Leslie McQuown of Stone Edge Farms Vineyards and Winery to take the helm as executive chef of Enclos, its new restaurant in Sonoma, Calif., when it opened in 2024. Limoges’s tasting menu celebrates the region, his upbringing, French training, and sensibility sharpened inside many Michelin-starred kitchens. Michelin took notice immediately, awarding two stars out of the gate, and this year Enclos quickly ascended to three, cementing the 37-year-old chef as a true rising star in global gastronomy.

It has been a meteoric rise for Johnny and Kasie Curiel’s Fonda Fina Hospitality. Founded just three years ago in Denver, the husband-wife duo has already opened five concepts, three of which already hold a Michelin star. At the heart of their burgeoning empire is chef Johnny’s take on Mexican fine dining, which draws influence from his youth in Guadalajara before he moved to Denver as a teenager. Kasie can call on her decade of experience inside Hillstone, a restaurant group famed inside the industry for its operational acumen. So it’s no mystery as to why the couple’s restaurant group has been able to scale so effectively to this point. This year has already seen the opening of the intimate tasting-menu restaurant Milpero in Denver, which earned a star months after opening, as well as the expansion outside Colorado to new outposts of their concept Alteño in both Austin and Charleston.

“There’s no poor person’s food or rich person’s food. It’s food. It’s powerful,” said Vijay Kumar as he accepted the James Beard Award for Best Chef: New York in 2025. “And the real luxury is to be able to connect with each other around the dinner table.” Kumar’s victory was built upon the work he’d done at his Michelin-starred restaurant Semma. The duo behind ascendant hospitality group Unapologetic Foods, Roni Mazumdar and Chintan Pandya, had convinced Kumar to open the restaurant with them in 2022, and it became an instant hit. Like Unapologetic’s other concepts in the city, Semma is uncompromising in its take on Indian fare, drawing on Kumar’s upbringing in the southern part of the country in the state of Tamil Nadu. Diners have flocked there for such as valiya chemmeen moilee (lobster tail, mustard, turmeric, and coconut milk) and Gunpowder Dosa (rice & lentil crepe, potato masala, and sambar). Semma has retained its Michelin star for three years running, remaining the only Indian restaurant in New York holding that honor.

“I’m surprised, because I didn’t think we fit the standard mold at all,” chef Amanda Shulman told the Michelin guide after Her Place Supper Club became one of only three restaurants in Philadelphia to earn a star in the city’s first guide. When she opened Her Place in 2021, the idea was to create less of a restaurant and more of a dinner party, with two seatings a night in the intimate space near Philly’s Rittenhouse Square. The nightly set menu is described by the restaurant as “French and Italian with some Jewish touches swirled in.” With her fellow chef and husband Alex Kemp, they’ve grown their hospitality group in the ensuing years, opening My Loup in 2023 and the casual Pine Street Grill in 2025.

This culinary duo turned a subterranean East Village space into one of New York’s great destinations for wine and food and then repeated the trick by opening a restaurant directly above them. Beverage director Chase Sinzer and chef Joshua Pinsky met at David Chang’s Michelin two-star Momofuku Ko and set out together to make something more casual than that tasting-counter restaurant. The European-inspired bistro Claud was their first venture, opening in 2022 and became perpetually packed. In 2024, they opened the raw bar Penny, and it made our list of the “10 Best New Restaurants in America.” The two haven’t slowed down, opening the 12-seat, 1,000-selection wine bar Stars late last year.

Las Vegas is no stranger to droughts, but Sarah Thompson was able to end one of them this year. When she took home the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Southwest, she ended Sin City’s 15-year dry spell at the awards. Thompson originally arrived in Las Vegas in 2019 to open Elio, chef Daniela Soto-Innes’s restaurant inside the Wynn. Thompson had worked with Soto-Innes when she ran Enrique Olvera’s hit Mexican restaurant Cosme in New York City. The pandemic made Elio’s run short lived, but she and the resort regrouped. They opened Casa Playa together, with Thompson crafting a menu dedicated to coastal Mexican Cuisine, serving dishes like lobster tostada; scallops with roasted carrot pipian, huitlacoche esquites, and epazote; and branzino Zarandeado with chile soy adobo and watermelon radish.

There may not be a more enthusiastic advocate for San Diego than Travis Swikard. After spending a decade in New York City working for Daniel Boulud, he returned home to Southern California to open his own restaurant right smack in the downtown of America’s Finest City. Swikard built a journey around the Mediterranean with his menu at Callie, while showcasing the region’s outstanding produces and seafood. With this success under his belt he has expanded to La Jolla, opening the chic Fleurette, which draws inspiration from across the South of France. With these two restaurants, he’s helped make San Diego one of America’s most exciting dining destinations right now.

Chef Tracy Malechek-Ezekiel and beverage director Arjav Ezekiel have built a restaurant that turns the old restaurant business model on its head. The married duo opened Birdie’s in 2021, introducing to Austin, Texas, a counter-service restaurant with no reservations that was still chef-driven and hospitable. The idea paid off: People formed lines down the block waiting to dine on Malechek-Ezekiel’s fare—which she describes as seasonal American food with French and Italian influence—and to order from Arjav’s well-curated wine list. They’ve topped numerous best-of lists over the years, and Arjav won a James Beard Award for Outstanding Professional in Beverage Service for 2025. Since opening, they’ve pivoted their restaurant further, becoming a prix fixe-only destination with a rotating seasonal menu.

In 2018 Pascaline Lepeltier conquered France, and this year she nearly topped the world. The 46-year-old from the Loire Valley was the first woman to ever win the title of Best Sommelier in France, and last month she won second place at the World’s Best Sommelier competition. Though she competes for her home country, she has been living stateside since 2009 and, through her New York City restaurants Lepeltier, has become a major leader in the wine world. Last decade, her old haunt Rogue Tomate amassed one of the world’s great lists as she stood at the forefront of the natural-wine movement. And now at Chambers, which she opened as co-owner in Tribeca in 2022, she has created one of New York’s ultimate dining destinations for oenophiles. And on top of curating amazing wine lists and winning competitions, the master sommelier has also burnished her scholarly cred, publishing her book One Thousand Vines: A New Way to Understand Wine.