Joanna and Cristian - the couple behind The Best Chef awards

Joanna Slusarczyk and Christian Gadau felt there are a lot of awards and recognition platforms for restaurants but there were none dedicated to chefs. They decided to start a group that would celebrate chefs and their work and exchange ideas and opinions. In 2015, they came up with the idea of The Best Chef, a Facebook page.

Joanna recalls it started as a hobby for her husband Cristian where he was posting photos of interesting dishes, his interactions with chefs and building a community of chefs. Cristian, who had worked in multiple roles in hospitality industry was also a chef at one point of time. The online community started to grow and soon they had chefs from all over the world as members. 

In 2017, while thinking how to take this community forward, Joanna and Cristian were convinced that chefs were no longer limited to being in kitchen. They were important for marketing, for running sustainability programs and overall identity of the restaurant. 

“We believe everything starts from chefs. They are the figures around whom revolves the whole process, they represent the values of the restaurant and we feel it should be recognised. Also, in many cases when a restaurant wins an award, it stays with the restaurant even if the chef leaves. We wanted chefs to be recognised,” she says.

By 2017, the Facebook page had grown in popularity and crossed half a million followers. The couple decided to do something real with this virtual platform. They didn’t have any big editorial group backing them nor they had investors. But Joanna recalls they knew the hospitality world a bit and were connected with a lot of people from the industry specially chefs over last two years. 

They decided to host first awards in Warsaw, Poland in 2017. Being based there, Joanna says it was logistically easier for them to manage the event.

The first edition of The Best Chef awards got a lot of attention and was appreciated by everyone. The couple decided to make it an annual affair. The first edition had 300 winners, it changed to 100 winners in later editions. For their last awards edition in Dubai, they changed the format to recognise chefs with knives - one, two or three knives - based on their standing and still have three top winners that are best of the best along with winners in special categories.

From the beginning, The Best Chef awards were based on voting. Initially it was a smaller group of people - chefs, journalists and food lovers in general voting for them. This year, when they changed format from top 100 to knives, they also broadened the number of voters to have statistically significant results.

After six editions of The Best Chef awards in Europe, their position in the continent was well established. Joanna and Cristian decided to take the awards to different continents and held the last edition at Yucatan in Mexico. For this year, they wanted to bring the awards to Asia and Joanna recalls Dubai was the best option as it has one of the best food scenes in the world.

“Dubai for us was the best option as the food and beverage scene here is really great. Along with very big restaurant brands, there are a lot of restaurants now with great chefs behind them. These chefs are leading these restaurants, being there all the time, speaking with guests and there was value in these places,” Joanna explains adding it is an amazing place to visit. She jokes that she can’t help admiring all the skyscrapers from her taxi as she moves around the city.

The eighth edition of The Best Chef Awards in Dubai, hosted at Atlantis, The Palm, with the support of the Dubai Department of Economy and Tourism (DET), honoured 550 chefs from 61 countries, making it the largest edition to date and a testament to Dubai’s growing status as a culinary capital. This event became a perfect platform for Dubai to showcase itself to the best in the world. Everyone was in awe of the infrastructure and the dining scene of the city. Apart from the gala awards night, this edition had special chef collaboration dinners and talks about the present and future of industry and sustainability.

Joanna, a PhD in neuropsychoparmacology - a scientific field that studies how drugs affect the mind and behavior. It combines neuroscience and psychopharmacology - from Institute of Pharmacology, Krakow, Poland. She found that there is a lot of science and research goes into making of food with some restaurants having a dedicated research department as well. She added ‘Food meets Science’ aspect to the event. “We are always laughing that I'm more the the science and logistic part of the team while Cristian is more the food and creative part. So we are keep balancing each other quite well,” she jokes.

Lead pic: Piotr Wyszyński