Welcome to The Maldon® Salt 50, a celebration of this year’s 50 most influential users of our famous sea salt flakes. Our unique pyramid flakes have been the choice of chefs and caterers, bakers and bartenders for almost 145 years. But influence takes many forms.
The Maldon® Salt 50 returns in 2026 to celebrate the individuals and organisations who champion our salt in every corner of the culinary world.
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A New Chapter
For 2026, we’re shining a light on a broader world than ever before – from the voices shaping how we think about food, to the nomads traversing the globe and bringing fresh inspiration to the table.
The Disruptors
The boundary pushers who are challenging what traditional chef life looks like, whether that’s in the kitchen, in business, or beyond.
The hospitality industry is an-ever evolving place to work. Its potential to break boundaries is undoubtedly part of its charm – and why so many have carved out such successful careers in it.
The Disruptors are the chefs, entrepreneurs and industry figures who are rewritting what a career in food can look like. Some are challenging the culture of professional kitchens from within, championing wellbeing, transparency and sustainable working practices. Others are building entirely new business models – ghost kitchens, supper clubs, product ranges, content empires – that bear little resemblance to the conventional restaurant path. Others still are pushing at the boundaries of what food itself can be.
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The Voices
The media figures who shape how the world thinks, talks and writes about food.
Food has always had a story to tell. But the people who shape how that story reaches us – the food writers and editors, the broadcasters, the critics, the photographers, the podcast hosts and journalists – wield a particular kind of power. They frame the conversation. They decide what matters; what’s worth celebrating and what deserves scrutiny. They can make careers and alter perspectives.
The Voices are the media figures with an appetite for the authentic. Across print and digital, radio and television, podcasts and newsletters, they are the ones asking the questions, filing the reviews and brining the world of professional cookery to a wider audience. Whether they are championing a debut restaurant, interrogating the ethics of the food industry or simply making people hungry with the quality of their storytelling, their influence on food culture runs deeps.
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The Nomads
The chefs for whom great cooking has never belonged to a single address.
Some chefs find their voice in a single kitchen, in a single postcode, over the course of a career spent in one remarkable place. The Nomads have found theirs everywhere, and in everything that came before.
Rather than staying in one place, they are the cooks imbued with a sense of wanderlust – always on the move – travelling across continents absorbing techniques and flavours with the kind of reverence that only comes from genuine curiosity.
What they share is the understanding that great cooking is rarely native to a single address. Palates are formed in other people’s kitchens, on other people’s tables, across generations and through meals that, while never meant to be instructional were, quietly, precisely, just that. Their food tells these stories. And wherever their journeys began, however far they have travelled, Maldon Salt has always been as ever present.
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The Patrons
Community minded chefs and organisations going above and beyond to give back to the hospitality industry,
The hospitality industry gives an enormous amount. It feeds people, gathers communities, creates livelihoods and, at it’s best, offers a genuine sense of belonging to those who work within it, creating fulfilling lifelong careers.
For many who cross its threshold, the desire to give something back is strong. The Patrons is one such group. Altruistic chefs, organisations and industry figures who understand that a rising tide lifts all boats. The Patrons are investing their time, expertise and resources into the industry they love. Some are mentoring the next generation of chefs, offering opportunities to those who might otherwise never find their way in. Others are addressing food poverty, championing inclusivity to working to make the hospitality sector more sustainable, more equitable and more representative of the communities it serves.
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The New Wave
The up-and-coming chefs and influencers who may be new to the industry but are already making culinary waves.
The New Wave are the chefs and food personalities who, while only just getting started, are already making it incredibly difficult to avert our collective gaze.
Some have come through the traditional route: culinary college, long stints in demanding kitchens, accolades earnt along the way. Others have arrived via social media, supper clubs or pop-ups, building devoted followings and honing their skills entirely on their own terms. What they have in common is momentum. These are the names being passed between industry insiders, the talents being watched by the chefs who trained them, the rising stars who are undoubtedly destined for greatness.
They may be new to the Maldon 50. But the quality of what they’re already producing suggests they won’t be newcomers for long.
The Maldon Salt 50 2026
Lee Young
Michelin-trained chef Lee Young has put in the hours. Working his way up through pub, hotel and restaurant kitchens over the last 17 years, his experience has included stints at Heston Blumenthal’s Fat Duck Group and the Four Seasons Hotel group.
In 2024 he struck out on his own, launching @leeyoungfitness, an Instagram account dedicated to showing people that they could learn how to create delicious, nutritious meals whilst getting lean – all without compromising on flavour. His understanding of macros and what makes a dish taste good, as well as his straightforward delivery style has made him a trusted, relatable source of inspiration to his hundreds of thousands of followers. In short, he’s the perfect case study of how you can forge your own career path.
Thomasina Miers OBE
When Thomasina Miers won the revived MasterChef in 2005, it was only the beginning. Two years later she co-founded Wahaca, the Mexican restaurant group that would go on to reshape the British high street’s relationship with Mexican food. Schooled at Ballymaloe and shaped by her mother’s kitchen, her cooking has always been rooted in something real. Seven cookbooks in, that instinct hasn’t faded.
But it’s her campaigning work that marks her out as a true disruptor: a co-founder of Chefs in Schools, working to transform what children eat and how they understand food, and a committed advocate alongside the Soil Association for farming practices that actually make sense. Great food, she’s long argued, shouldn’t be a privilege – and she’s spent two decades making that case count.
Ashley Palmer-Watts
Ashley Palmer-Watts has earned the right to do things his way, spending two decades of his early life pushing the limits of what a restaurant can be – most notably at Dinner by Heston, where he headed up the two-Michelin-starred restaurant that would quietly become one of London’s great chef-making kitchens.
His most recent move has challenged the status quo but in a different way. In co-founding The Devonshire alongside Oisin Rogers and Charlie Carroll he’s helped to redefine what a pub can be with Michelin-standard cooking meeting the warmth and democracy of an old-school pub. Queues out the door and the country’s top chefs clamouring for a table say everything. Music, atmosphere and a back room that’s become the stuff of legend say the rest.
Gary Usher
Few people have done more than Gary Usher to prove that hospitality can work differently. His first restaurant, Sticky Walnut opened in Chester in 2011, and despite proving himself quite the one to watch, he struggled to secure conventional funding routes. And so, long before the model became fashionable, he turned to crowdfunding, raising over £100k in a week for his second site and showing that with a bit of bravery and a whole lot of hard work, restaurant funding needn’t follow the traditional model.
More recently, he opened The White Horse Pub, launching a guest chef series that’s welcomed some of the finest names in British cooking to work alongside him. Candid about the very real challenges of the industry he loves, he remains one of its most determined and dependable champions.
Mark Birchall
Mark Birchall isn’t just one of Britain’s most decorated chefs – he’s proof that fine dining and deep responsibility needn’t be mutually exclusive. Chef patron at Moor Hall in Lancashire, home to three Michelin stars and a Green Star, his credentials are formidable: a Roux Scholarship in 2011 took him to El Celler de Can Roca – then the world’s best restaurant – and he refined his craft further at Simon Rogan’s l’Enclume.
But it’s what happens outside the kitchen that sets him apart. A working kitchen garden, meat reared locally, minimal food miles, organic farming, fermentation to extend the life of produce, and composting of waste from both kitchen and garden: at Moor Hall under Mark’s influence, sustainability isn’t a selling point. It’s a discipline.
Seema Pankhania
Better known to her millions of followers as @seemagetsbaked, Seema’s childhood love of baking and cooking was only briefly disrupted when she went to university to study neuroscience. Upon graduating she decided to follow her passion, learning the ropes of professional kitchens at the likes of Gordon Ramsay’s Lucky Cat before moving to MOB Kitchen, developing recipes and creating irresistible foodie content.
Her viral series ‘Around the World in 195 Meals’ has seen Seema cook the national dish of every country on earth welcoming guests from each country to share the stories behind the dishes and proving that curiosity is as important a skill as technique. Now also author of cookbook Craveable, Seema is rewriting what a food career can look like.
Fallow Chefs
Chefs Will Murray and Jack Croft – of Fallow Chefs fame– have some serious joint pedigree. Having met when both working at Dinner by Heston, they left the two Michelin-starred establishment in 2019 to set about their own venture. Fallow came first, with its unique approach to uncelebrated ingredients and was followed by FOWL in 2023 and Roe in 2024.
Their other point of difference? A genuine desire to bridge the gap between professional kitchens and home cooks. Their hugely popular social channels pull back the curtain on chef techniques, food science and the stories behind restaurant-quality dishes. Will and Jack are the epitome of a new age of chefs – refusing to gatekeep for those who want to learn and offering innovative dishes for those who simply want to enjoy their standout cooking.
Ollie Templeton
Spanish-born Ollie Templeton loved food from an early age and while a career in professional kitchens was on the cards from adolescence, the nature of the career and restaurant model he’s forged was surely not on his bingo card.
After training at Leiths and stints at Sketch, Caravan and Moro, Ollie co-founded Carousel in 2014 with his brother Ed and two of his cousins. At a time when restaurants were built around a single chef’s vision, Ollie did the opposite – throwing open his kitchen to the world. And to date, over 300 chefs from over 50 countries have cooked with him at Carousel. Now, Ollie is working on an exciting new chapter with the opening of Cometa, a contemporary Mexican seafood restaurant highlighting his love for creative Mexican cooking, told through a distinctly British lens.
Adam Handling MBE
Multi Michelin-starred Adam Handling needs little introduction. The Scottish chef still credits Gleneagles – where he was their first ever apprentice chef – as the place that instilled both his love of being in the kitchen as well as his fierce discipline and dedication to the craft. A year spent travelling opened his eyes up to new techniques and influences, and it was in Japan that the principles behind zero-waste cooking truly piqued his interest. That philosophy became a passion, reflected in everything he created and became a founding principle when he opened The Frog in Covent Garden in 2017. Now with six sites to his name, his sustainable approach to food and ingredients continues to put him at the vanguard of how restaurants can do things differently and achieve greatness.
Asma Khan
Asma Khan has always been a disruptor. Born in India into a royal family, she arrived in the UK in 1991 with no intention of becoming a chef. Though she loved the food of her childhood, she had never formally learnt to cook. That changed when she returned to India to immerse herself in her family recipes, bringing that knowledge back with her to London.
What began as intimate supper clubs at her home grew into one of London’s most celebrated restaurants. ‘Darjeeling Express’ has become a favourite of Hollywood A-listers and royals and has been featured in the Michelin Guide. Her pioneering kitchen is entirely female, made up of women who began as home cooks, many of whom have been working with Asma for over a decade. Now Chef Advocate for the UN World Food Programme, author of award-winning cookbook Monsoon and a powerful voice for women in and beyond the kitchen, Asma Khan continues to challenge and reshape the industry.
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Susie Flory
Not many private chefs can trace their career back to selling salad boxes to fellow students at university. But @susieflory has never been one to wait for permission. A natural-born entrepreneur with a genuine love of food, she carved her own path via a whole host of foodie brands, before landing exactly where she belongs.
Now a private chef, recipe developer and podcaster with a growing Instagram following and a much-loved partnership with Janie Deal, Susie has more than earnt her place at the table. Her recipes are effortlessly tasty, her plates beautifully put together and her personality utterly infectious. With 2026 shaping up as her biggest year yet, Susie is just getting started.
Tiggy Willett
Thousands of likes and millions more views are what Tiggy, or rather @life_with_tigs_, calls a normal day in the ‘office’. The foodie content creator has carved out her own niche in the influencer space, sharing delicious content focused on high-quality ingredients, shopping locally and above all else, cooking for others.
Feeding others is perhaps best captured in her viral Instagram series, Let’s Feed Steve – a mission to rescue her boyfriend’s apprentice from a diet of fast food and meal deals. Series one took off, and now series two is well underway, taking flavours and dishes on a world tour, all with a little help from Maldon Salt.
Finley Richards
2025 MasterChef quarter finalist @finleyrichards may only be 23, but he already knows how to pack a punch in the culinary ring. The self-taught chef from Newport applied to the show after amassing over two million views on his online cooking videos, wanting to put himself to the test and experience the heat of a ‘real’ kitchen. He did just that, with the judges lavishing praise on his flavour-packed dishes such as Garam Masala Carrots, Onion Bhaji, Cashew nut puree, mint and coriander sauce, chickpea dukkah and pickled mangoes.
He may not have grown up around professional kitchens, but with an uncle and grandfather who both had careers in cooking, that desire to experiment, create and feed is undoubtedly in his blood. No question, this Welshman’s trajectory points firmly upwards.
Georgia Hearn
Having learnt her trade at the world-famous Leiths School of Food and Wine, @georgiahearn_ has successfully built her own catering business over the last five years, creating recipes, hosting supper clubs and cooking for private parties all over the world.
Menus that zero in on seasonality have become her trademark, as has sharing recipes that help make anyone become the perfect host – along with tips and tricks on preparation and presentation – a pinch of Maldon among them. It’s a mantra that’s front and centre of her first cookbook ‘The Brunch Club’ which is packed full of inspiration for feeding friends. If this is what she can do in her first five years, eyes peeled for what’s coming next.
Alice Power
Alice Power’s route into professional cooking wasn’t conventional. Originally a civil servant, she left a job in government to retrain at Leiths Culinary School before joining Tommy Banks’ Michelin-starred Black Swan in 2021 as Chef de Partie. Only three years later, she was appointed Head Chef.
It is a rise that speaks for itself. An advocate for the hyper-local, sustainability-led ethos that has long defined The Black Swan’s identity, @_alicepower_ has continued to champion this approach working with Executive Chef @callumlesliechef to make it their own. Ingredients sourced close to home, cooked with precision and respect.
Emily Bonner
Part marketing strategist, part recipe developer, part incurable traveller, @_eating_with_emily is a food creator with genuine range. Her feed is a masterclass in making the elevated feel achievable, drawing on years spent eating her way through Michelin-starred restaurants and planning holidays entirely around where to eat next.
Her ethos is straightforward: whole ingredients, simple recipes, maximum flavour. It was a knockout Greek salad that first sent her content viral back in 2023. Known to her followers as the egg queen, she has built a loyal following on the art of the elevated brunch. Her idea of heaven? Ripe tomatoes, extra virgin olive oil, a generous scatter of Maldon and a crusty baguette to mop up the juices.
Flavour Fellas
Max and Hamish – @flavourfellas_ to everyone else – have been on the scene for just over a year, and already it feels like they’ve always been here. This food-obsessed double act are unapologetic champions of big, bold, savoury flavours, though don’t let that fool you: they’re equally at home experimenting with classic sweet treats – Basil Butter Chocolate Cookies finished with Maldon Salt anyone?
Their popular care home series, in which they sit down with elderly residents to celebrate a shared love of food across the generations, shows there’s genuine warmth behind the flavour-chasing. Food, for Max and Hamish, has always been about more than what’s on the plate. One year in, the Flavour Fellas are just warming up.
Chloe Hood
AKA @_lifeandfork_, Chloe Hood is the brains behind the Substack and Instagram page of the same name. On a mission to showcase new and exciting recipes, Chloe combines style and substance across all her content, showing her audience how to make great tasting dishes that happen to look fantastic too.
Spotted as an up-and-comer by the likes of The Maldon Salt 50 alumnus, Jamie Oliver, Chloe’s fusion of flavours, techniques and dishes (Miso Cinnamon Stewed Apples with Smoked Salt, anyone?) is unsurprisingly putting her on the radar as a foodie influencer with big things to come. With a growing community drawn to her bold flavour combinations and effortless aesthetic, she is fast becoming a reference point for a new generation of home cooks.
Sophie Sugrue
Sophie Sugrue (@sopthefoodie) made her name as MasterChef’s first ever plant-based finalist – eventually coming in as runner up in 2025 having wowed audiences throughout the series thanks to her ability to fashion humble veg into showstopping fine dining dishes.
In doing so, the Essex-born chef, who’s been vegan for 10 years, has joined the ranks of a handful of chefs determined to showcase what modern plant-based food can look like. With Substack ‘No Meat, No Problem’ to her name and pop-ups and collaborations in the works, expect to see Sophie continue to take vegan plant-based dining to new heights.
“I’m so excited to have made the list – that’s amazing! I’m such a huge fan of Maldon Salt, especially being an Essex girl myself.”
Matt Sampson
It’s no exaggeration to call Matt Sampson something of a prodigy. Still only 25 years old, his achievements would make any seasoned chef more than proud. Given his first big break by Peter Sanchez-Iglesias at Michelin-starred Casamia aged just 17, he went on to hone his skills at L’Enclume under Simon Rogan, before returning to his home of Wales to take up the position of Sous Chef at Gareth Ward’s two Michelin-starred Ynyshir.
In 2025, he took the plunge and opened his own first solo venture, Restaurant Fir, in Llangattock and shortly after, it was recognised in the Michelin Guide. With just four tables, the intimate dining experience sees Sampson cook, serve and explain every dish to his guests, with the tasting menu focused on fresh, seasonal produce elevated to exceptional standards.
No doubt, @chefmattsampson isn’t reaching for something, he’s already there.
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Punam Vaja
Londoner Punam Vaja is the brains behind Khao, a unique supper club that showcases Gujarati cooking and celebrates bringing people together. Taking inspiration from her rich Indian and East African heritage, she launched Khao over six years ago introducing Pav Bhaji – Mumbai’s famous street food – and buttery Srikhand with Pistachio Crumble – to a London food scene keen for more interesting, authentic and regional cooking.
Growing up in a family where every guest was fussed over and hosting often meant prepping food for up to 100 people, Vaja cites her Grandma as the woman who instilled what being a great host means, and both her parents as the inspiration behind her cooking style. Popping up all over London as well as in Portugal, expect to see Khao take over the capital and beyond.
Eric Lanlard
Eric Lanlard grew up staring through the window of a patisserie. He trained there at 18 and moved to Luxembourg to work as a chocolatier, before being called up for national service and spending two years cooking on the flagship of the French Navy, visiting 17 countries along the way. His pastry, already classical and precise, was quietly absorbing the world.
It was the Roux brothers who brought him to London in 1989. He became their head pastry chef within two years, then struck out alone in 1995, eventually opening Cake Boy in Battersea – part patisserie, part cookery school. Eight cookbooks followed. So did wedding cakes for Madonna and Claudia Schiffer. The cuisine is French. The journey, truly global.
Rachel Khoo
Born in Croydon, raised in Germany and trained in Paris, Rachel Khoo has never cooked by geography. Her father is Malaysian Chinese, her mother Austrian, and she now calls Sweden home, but what drives her in the kitchen has always been something simpler: curiosity, flavour, and the conviction that cooking should feel like a pleasure, not a performance.
With a debut memoir, The Smallest Restaurant in Paris, set to land this year and seasons judging on Great British Menu and The Great Australian Bake Off making her a household name across two continents; this is a truly nomadic chef who puts every address, kitchen and territory she has experienced firmly on the plate.
Annie Mae Herring
Annie Mae Herring (otherwise known as @theculinarybee), is one of those chefs whose food can evoke memory, nostalgia and flavour all at once. Perhaps it’s her dedication to storytelling, or her mix of Dutch, Austrian, Scottish and Irish heritage.
A recipe developer and content creator who took Leiths Online Patisserie Course and Professional Course over lockdown, Herring’s focus on slow, seasonal cooking as well as food history, has helped her to create a platform that showcases some of the more forgotten dishes – from around the world – but also from around our very own British Isles. Famously, she collaborated with Maldon in 2025 to theme an entire recipe series around the wealth of produce found in her beloved Essex.
Annie Mae may be firmly rooted in one spot, but her recipes can transport fans to both different places and different times.
Remi Idowu
With Ghanaian and Nigerian parents, Remi Idowu was immersed in the bold rich flavours of West African cuisine from an early age. That passion for food and flavour didn’t go to waste and aged just 19 she launched Bakes By Remi, a baking business which has since evolved into the viral @foodbyremi.
A woman on a mission to make cooking less intimidating, her Substack ‘how the cookie crumbles’, along with cookbook ‘sugar & spice’ delve into both the art and the science of how to create great-tasting, fusion led dishes, including Gochujang Chicken Kyiv and Mango Habanero Chicken Wings. Named in Forbes’ 2025 30 under 30 list, expect plenty more from this trailblazer.
Giuseppe Federici
Sepps didn’t need to travel to find his cuisine. It was already there, in the Stoke-on-Trent kitchen where his Nonna Marianna, who emigrated from Sicily over 65 years ago, cooked the food of her homeland every day. Arancini, pasta al pomodoro, minestrone. A whole island’s worth of recipes, carried across and kept alive.
Sepps began cooking his way back through that culinary inheritance – choosing to go plant based to make the classics even more accessible and posting the results. In 2022, he began posting with his Nonna, sharing a winning recipe that quadrupled his audience overnight. His bestselling cookbook, Cooking with Nonna, followed in 2024. Now based in London, he recently launched his first kitchen residency, Giuseppe’s Kitchen, at BOXHALL City.
Ixta Belfrage
Dubbed ‘deliciously untraditional’, Ixta Belfrage’s dishes reflect the many and varied influences she grew up around. With a grandfather who lived in Mexico, a Brazilian mother and her own childhood spent partly in Italy, little wonder that Ixta is decidedly experimental when it comes to her own recipe creation.
Spotted and snapped up by Ottolenghi, working first at NOPI and then at the Test Kitchen, she then went on to pen two highly successful books, 2022’s MEZCLA and FUSÃO in 2025. Her food is very much a celebration of multiculturalism, diversity and intertwining influences, created to surprise and delight – a feat she more than accomplishes.
Men with The Pot
Slawek Kalkraut and Krzysztof Szymanski grew up in Poland, spent over a decade working in hotels in Northern Ireland, and one day walked into the woods with a camera and a cast-iron pot. That was 2019. Fast-forward to 2026 and they’ve racked up over 15 million followers across TikTok and Instagram as @menwiththepot.
The pair cook everything over open fire in the forests of County Fermanagh: from paella to pasta, steak to sandwiches. ASMR does the talking – crackling flames, the sizzle of a pan, a knife on a board, all making any commentary unnecessary. Between two countries, one adopted home and a kitchen that moves with them wherever they go, they’ve very much got the world watching.
Helena & Vikki Moursellas
Chefs, authors, content creators, supper club hosts, even reality TV stars, Helena & Vikki Moursellas are the identical twins bringing Greek cuisine to the masses.
Raised in Adelaide, Australia, where they spent many a formative hour in their Yiayia’s kitchen, they now share their love of Greek food with the world, most recently through their 2025 cookbook OPA!, where they showcase creations like stuffed fried olives and grilled king prawns with fennel & caper butter – as well as crediting Maldon sea salt as one of the three kitchen items they couldn’t live without!
Now based on opposite sides of the world, with Vikki still down under and Helena splitting her time between London & Sydney (via pop ups in Japan), they’re shining examples of how certain dishes can make you feel rooted, no matter where you may be in the world.
Gennaro Contaldo
Ask any member of the British public who their favourite Italian chef is and chances are Gennaro’s name will come up. A certified national treasure – who made the UK his home after first moving here aged 20 – his passion and love of the food from his home country is undeniably infectious.
Known for his relationship with the late great Antonio Carluccio – their friendship having been born when Gennaro worked with him at his famous Neal Street Restaurant in the nineties – their return to Italy in 2011 for BBC’s Two Greedy Italians made them household names.
A dyed in the wool Maldonite – using our iconic salt to flavour his simple, ingredient led creations – Gennaro is a chef who can undoubtedly be credited with helping to popularise Italian food in the UK. What a lot we owe him.
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Simon Boyle
Simon Boyle is a Glasgow-born chef, author and social entrepreneur whose career spans Michelin-starred kitchens and a Savoy apprenticeship. After volunteering in Sri Lanka following the 2004 tsunami, he returned convinced that food could be a force for change. In 2010 he founded Beyond Food and restaurant the Brigade Bar + Kitchen, a charity and social enterprise using food as a catalyst to help people rebuild their independence and enter the workforce. A Fellow of the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts, Boyle received special recognition from the Basque Culinary World Prize in 2020 for his Covid relief work.
His charity works continues with Beyond Food expanding into West Ham Foundation’s community hub and a new London Bridge events space. Simon’s belief that change starts around the table is as strong as ever.
The Weeping Chef
Alec Tomasso began his chef life as a building engineer with a side passion for cooking. In 2012, an appearance on BBC’s Masterchef turned everything on its head for Alec, granting him the opportunity to focus on his side passion full time and leave the day job behind, The Weeping Chef was born.
Named in 2025 as The Craft Guild of Chefs’ Street Food Chef of the Year, his story has been over a decade in the making, yet it was during the pandemic where Alec was able to make his most profound impact, cooking and delivering meals for NHS key workers via a mobile kitchen he hand built from an old horse trailer. From providing mobile, wedding and film location catering, to private dining, BBQ and street-food, this is a socially conscious chef of many hues.
The Dusty Knuckle Bakery
A cult artisan bakery and café with sites in Dalston and Harringay and a van in Highbury Fields, The Dusty Knuckle has built a fierce reputation for exceptional bread and pastries – cementing its standing in 2017 when it began supplying London’s restaurants.
Founded in a repurposed shipping container in 2014 by Max Tobias and Rebecca Oliver and hailed as London’s best bakery by Time Out in 2025, this purpose-driven business is using its growing influence to help at-risk young people between 18-25 develop their skills and build confidence through on-the-job training and mentorship. In targeting its impactful, award-winning youth programme at those facing significant barriers to employment, The Dusty Knuckle is proving itself as a business with a social conscience baked in.
Tom Kerridge
Not only one of Britain’s most celebrated and instantly recognisable chefs, Tom Kerridge wields an influence that extends well beyond the kitchen. With over 30 years in the industry he loves, he has become one of its most passionate promoters using his profile to challenge negative perceptions of hospitality as a career, while speaking candidly about the pressures operators face.
Fronting numerous documentary series on the sector, while campaigning for a reduction in VAT for pubs and restaurants, he has also backed youth employment initiatives, having run apprenticeships across his restaurant group. Always banging the drum for hospitality, rarely one to shy away from uncomfortable subject matter, his advocacy carries water because it comes from someone still very much behind the pass.
Mission Kitchen
Nestled within the confines of London’s famous New Covent Garden Market, a diverse community of over 100 independent food businesses from across the industry are quietly building empires. Mission Kitchen plays host to these new food entrepreneurs, providing shared working spaces and commercial kitchens, alongside an exclusive programme of events, mentoring, networking and business development opportunities, including facilitating face to face meetings with buyers.
Founded by Charlie Gent, Chris Lumsden, and Paul Smyth in 2021, the 16,000-square-foot space serves as an incubator to burgeoning brands, helping them scale operations and reduce barriers to entry in the food industry. This is the home of ‘challenger’ brands set to challenge the status quo.
The Clink Charity
Founded on the principle of rehabilitation through training, in 2025 alone The Clink Charity trained almost 400 people, fed 42,255 people and provided over 22,050 training hours for its students. The conceit was, at the time of founding in 2009, wholly unique; The Clink restaurant situated at HMP High Down was to the be the first public facing restaurant operating within a working prison.
The Charity, established a year later, has gone on to add multiple restaurant sites, a bakery, events business, gardens and a training café, picking up numerous awards in the process. Proof that hospitality – and society itself – benefits when people are given tangible skills and a second chance at life.
UCB Chelmsley Starters
Widely recognised as one of the UK’s finest culinary talent institutions, producing a host of chef alumni including Adam Smith MCA, Liam Dillon and Dan Lee, University College Birmingham has recently opened a new learning centre with a unique difference.
Located in the Chelmsley Wood Shopping Centre at the heart of the Solihull community, the purpose-built Chelmsley Starters Culinary School offers completely free level one learning to local people – giving them the skills and grounding to continue their education journey at the main university campus or gain a vital leg up into hospitality. Better still, the school boasts the popular Bluebell Wood eatery next door, where students cook a daily menu for hungry locals, offering real-world experience and the kind of opportunity that could see another new hospitality star emerge.
Josh Eggleton
Josh is the man changing the face of sustainable dining in the west country. With outstanding qualifications – he was a Gordon Ramsay scholar who completed stages at world-famous restaurants including The French Laundry – he turned down positions working with some of the country’s best chefs to take over the kitchen at The Pony and Trap in Chew Magna in 2006. Focused on fresh, local and sustainable produce, the pub soon won a Michelin star.
Now trading as The Pony, the site is complete with its own cookery school, kitchen garden, orchard and beehives; beautiful spaces that are also used to engage with local schools and charities. With a field to fork mentality that drives everything he does – Josh’s commitment to education and sustainability makes him a shoo-in for this list.
Countertalk
Founded in 2018 by Maldon Salt 50 alumnus, Rav Gill, Countertalk was created on a simple tenet: to raise standards across hospitality. Run by a team who have ‘walked the walk’ in the heat of service – its aim to improve the way kitchens are run for both employer and employee has caused it to become an industry stalwart in just eight short years.
The hospitality industry has always had community at its heart – but its documented struggles with challenging working environments are equally well known. Platforms like Countertalk have set out to change that, creating a community united by shared values, events, knowledge sharing and connecting people with quality jobs, all with the aim of shaping a stronger, fairer hospitality industry.
Phil Howard
Every chef worth their salt recognises the quiet genius of Phil Howard. The South-African born cook who opened the two Michelin-starred The Square aged just 24, changed the face of fine dining in 90’s London. After 25 years, he closed The Square to open Elystan Street in Chelsea, securing a Michelin star in the first year of trading.
A force for good in hospitality, Howard is known in the industry as the ‘chef’s chef’, nurturing talent and working to highlight the dangers of substance abuse to students studying for hospitality qualifications; a calling that speaks to his own battle in the early nineties. When Covid hit in 2020, he remained in the kitchens at Elystan Street, dutifully cooking meals for the essential workers at nearby Royal Brompton and Royal Marsden hospitals. A redemptive story of a chef that has taken giving back to new heights.
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Grace Dent
Grace Dent has built her reputation on a simple premise: that all food deserves serious attention, not just the kind served under a Michelin star. As the Guardian’s restaurant critic, she writes with the same rigour about a corner pub as she does a tasting menu, and her readers trust her for it. That honesty is what has made her column essential reading and what has seen lesser-known restaurants booked solid on the strength of a single review.
Away from her column, her podcast Comfort Eating – and book of the same name – explores the power that food holds over all of us. And, after years as one of MasterChef’s most familiar faces, she’s recently been announced as the show’s new host where she’s expected to bring that same warmth and unsparing honesty to one of the most-watched formats on British television.
Ravinder Bhogal
Few people in food write, cook and think with the range that Ravinder Bhogal does. Journalist, chef, restaurateur and author of three award-winning cookbooks, she is a columnist for the FT Weekend Magazine and Guardian Feast, her writing as layered and generous as the food she cooks. Her Marylebone restaurant Jikoni, which takes its name from the Kiswahili word for kitchen, is proudly rooted in her mixed heritage, drawing on the flavours of East Africa, South Asia and Britain to celebrate immigrant cuisine on its own terms.
A champion of diversity and authenticity in equal measure, she is a voice the food world listens to. And with good reason.
Marcus Wareing
Few voices carry as much weight in British professional cookery as Marcus Wareing’s. The man behind the Michelin-starred Marcus Wareing at The Berkeley has spent decades setting the bar – and helping others reach it. Since 2014, his role as a judge on MasterChef: The Professionals has given him a wider platform, one he uses not just to uphold exacting standards but to genuinely invest in the next generation of chefs.
“Maldon Salt is my number one ingredient and a chef’s best friend” said Wareing, before visiting the Maldon Salt Works for his TV show Tales from a Kitchen Garden. There, he witnessed first-hand the artisan techniques used to hand harvest its famous sea salt flakes. A fitting encounter between two names that understand, instinctively, why quality is never negotiable.
Ed Gamble & James Acaster
Since launching in 2018, Off Menu has quietly become one of the most beloved food podcasts around. Hosted by comedians Ed Gamble and James Acaster, the premise is wonderfully simple: guests step into a magical restaurant and order their dream meal, course by course, with no limitations and no budget.
Over 300 episodes in, it’s become one of the most listened-to podcasts in the UK, drawing guests from Daisy Ridley to Robert De Niro. More than just a comedy show, Off Menu has quietly shifted how people think and talk about food – and in the process, helped put a huge number of small, local and independent restaurants on the map. By turning ingredient choices into cultural moments, Off Menu has helped elevate the everyday act of eating into something genuinely magical.
Cherish Finden
Perhaps best known to the masses as a judge on Bake Off: The Professionals, Cherish Finden is known in the industry as an International Pastry Consultant and Fellow of the Royal Academy of Culinary Arts. To secure such esteem, Finden has honed her craft in hotels such as Raffles in Singapore and London’s The Langham, collecting awards and accolades along the way for her creative and precise approach to patisserie.
Famed for creations that incorporate Asian flavours from her Singaporean upbringing – think Masala Chai Mousse and Black Tea Sponge – Cherish’s natural artistic flare has helped her push the boundaries of what being a pastry chef means. Her exacting standards have undoubtedly made her one of the most respected voices in the world of patisserie.
Margie Nomura
Alumnus of Ireland’s world-renowned Ballymaloe Cookery School, Margie Nomura has all the hallmarks of a top professional chef. After 10 years cooking in kitchens around the world, she turned her attention closer to home and the food she believes everyone can create in their own kitchens.
Now host of the inimitably popular Desert Island Dishes podcast (in a foodie twist on the iconic format), Margie’s warmth, expertise and own love of food shines through as guests open up about the dishes that have shaped their lives. Off mic, that same love of food and her focus on flavour is what sets her weekly newsletter, Dinner Tonight, apart, with her understanding of seasoning and love of Maldon Salt, right at the heart of it.
Andi Oliver
Andi Oliver has spent decades doing what the best food broadcasters do: making audiences feel connected to what’s on the plate. As host of the BBC’s Great British Menu since 2020, she brings genuine warmth and an exacting palate to one of British television’s most competitive cooking formats. Away from the judging table, she presents Channel 4’s Food Unwrapped and is a familiar face on BBC’s Saturday Kitchen, her enthusiasm for ingredients and the stories behind them always apparent.
Her debut cookbook The Pepperpot Diaries: Stories from My Caribbean Table traces the flavours, history and heritage of Caribbean cooking through her own story. Across the BBC, Channel 4 and the page, she brings that same quality to everything: warmth, curiosity and a genuine belief that food is always worth talking about.
David Loftus
They say a picture is worth a thousand words and David Loftus has certainly captured the art of telling stories through photography. Perhaps best known for his close working partnership with Jamie Oliver, Loftus’ photography is renowned for its wonderful simplicity, ensuring the spotlight shines firmly on the food in the frame – and leaving millions inspired to have a go at recreating the mouthwatering recipes he captures.
Undoubtedly one of the most influential figures in the food & drink media landscape, in recent years Loftus has turned the lens on himself, releasing his own books for the first time. He is also the man responsible for Maldon Salt’s photography, capturing the unique nature of their sea salt flakes in all their glory across a vast array of dishes.
Nigella Lawson
Not only an internationally renowned food writer and TV cook, Nigella Lawson could better be described as a cultural icon, whose impact has changed the way we cook and eat. In 1998 she published her first cookbook, How To Eat: the Pleasures and Principles of Good Food. She now has twelve bestselling books to her name and has sold millions of copies worldwide.
Renowned for her evocative, accessible approach to food, it’s no surprise that Maldon Salt is a Nigella staple. She calls out the distinctive flakes by name in a number of her recipes and by all accounts, carries it in her handbag. And, in what promises to be a landmark moment, this autumn she joins The Great British Bake Off as a judge.
Nigel Slater OBE
The self-confessed ‘cook who writes’ needs little to no introduction. With a column in The Observer that’s spanned 30 years, a whole host of award-winning books detailing stories from the kitchen and recipes alike, and the memoir that set a new standard for storytelling around food, Slater is one of the most prominent voices in food in the 21st century.
A true understanding of food along with the emotions that cooking and eating can elicit, underpins everything that he writes. And whilst not a professional chef, his interest in all that makes a great dish – seasonality, quality ingredients – combined with his sharp observations and incisive words, makes that fact redundant: his home cooking credo and abundant love of his subject matter ensures he’s as relevant as ever in the modern food conversation.
It’s that sense of authority, combined with his evocative storytelling, that’s made him – and his writing – a much-loved household name.
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