Chefs to watch

Grace Bascos

Thursday, June 5, 2008 | midnight

Shaun King

Title:

Chef, rm seafood, Mandalay Bay

Age:

28

Training:

Privately trained as a Japanese apprentice for four and a half years in Los Angeles

King refers to his cooking style as “simple, seasonal and sublime,” and believes in using products from only viable and sustainable resources. “I get in good ingredients, I treat them well, and I try to showcase them as what they are: beautiful and a gift.”

Go-to ingredient:

Togarashi shichimi, Japanese seven-spice.

If I were on Top Chef:

“I’m naturally competitive. I don’t like to lose. I would be a force to be reckoned with—I’m studying, I’m constantly evolving ... I’ve got good knife skills. When you’re gaijin [a foreigner], you have to be good at holding a knife when you’re around a bunch of Japanese guys.”

Learn how to make Shaun King's refreshing summer ceviche in our exclusive video cooking class!

Todd Williams

Title:

Chef Tournant, Bradley Ogden at Caesars Palace

Age:

28

Training:

Culinary Institute of America

Williams’ passion for food began at an early age when he would visit his grandparents’ farm. Here he learned to appreciate the simplicity of ingredients, which translated well to Ogden’s own philosophy of farm-to-table cooking. “I always believe the farmer spends the most time with the product, spends months growing it, taking care of it, makes it taste good. I only have it for two days, so I’m not going to mess up what the farmer has created.”

Go-to ingredient:

I love thyme. And some spices, like Tabasco, or cayenne, for balance.

I wanted to be on Top Chef:

“I tried out for it. It turns out my uncle works for NBC.”

Adam Sobel

Title:

Chef/consultant; formerly of Bradley Ogden, Restaurant Guy Savoy, Company American Bistro

Age:

27

Training:

Culinary Institute of America

Sobel considers his forward-thinking cooking style “a great mixture of classic and nouveau.” He has an appreciation for food that tastes good and is honest. “There’s always authenticity to whatever I do. If it’s Thai cuisine, I try to make it taste as if a Thai grandmother put it together.”

Go-to ingredient:

“Soy sauce. Even at Guy [Savoy] I’d sneak soy in and use it in mushrooms to give it some depth of flavor.”

If I were on Top Chef:

“Quickfires I find challenging, but doing the technical stuff, where you have to break down chickens or turn artichokes, that’s where I feel I’d kill it.”