Ten years is long enough for an idea to become an institution, but also long enough to ask whether the form that carried it this far is still the right one for what comes next. As The Best Chef approaches its tenth edition, the organisation has chosen a simple symbol to announce that question publicly: an “X“.
It does not erase the previous decade. It marks the point where one cycle ends and another begins, echoing the staging of last year’s edition in Milan, where the sun and the full moon appeared above the room as symbols of a cycle already turning towards what would come next. What started as a platform placing chefs, their personalities and their ideas at the centre of the conversation has progressively expanded beyond an awards ceremony, bringing together gastronomy, science, creativity and an international community that now reaches far beyond the annual event.
The Best Chef has already shown a willingness to question its own format. The traditional Top 100 ranking gave way to the Knife recognition system, moving away from the need to place every chef on a single numerical ladder and towards a broader acknowledgement of different levels of achievement. The organisation now appears ready to go further. The language surrounding the tenth edition is deliberately less about celebration than construction: becoming stronger, more stable and more authoritative, while remaining willing to take risks. Maturity, in this case, is not being presented as a reason to become more cautious. It is being used as permission to become more ambitious.
On their personal accounts, Cristian Gadau and Joanna Slusarczyk described the moment in their own words:
X. Not an X to erase the past. Not an X to cancel the memories, the people, the ideas, and everything we built over the last ten years. It is an X to mark a change of direction. A moment to rethink. To rewrite. To bring The Best Chef into the future. Some things will change. Some things will stay. But everything will have one purpose: to make our work better. Together with our TEAM. Together with our community. Together with everyone who has been part of this journey. The next decade is not about starting from zero. It is about building on what we have learned. We are not kids anymore. We have a bigger backpack of experience, more knowledge, more responsibility and now, maybe, we need to be more ambitious, more fearless and more aggressive in the best possible way. It is time to make The Best Chef stronger. More solid. More stable. More authoritative. To consolidate what we have built. And to push harder towards what we believe it can become. The X is a new beginning. A new chapter we are genuinely excited about. And before we open it, we want to celebrate the end of the first cycle together, at our 10th edition. Ten years behind us. A new decade ahead. And after all these years, maybe the best thing we can do is become kids again. Play. Dream. Make mistakes. And build something we have never seen before. X marks the beginning. Back to being kids.”
There is an interesting contradiction inside those words. After ten years spent accumulating experience, credibility and responsibility, The Best Chef is choosing to speak about becoming a child again. Not by forgetting what has been learned, but by recovering the freedom to experiment before every decision has to resemble the one that preceded it. The organisation is entering the kind of moment familiar to restaurants, chefs and creative projects that survive their first period of success: eventually, continuity itself can become a constraint. What worked becomes part of the identity, and changing it becomes increasingly difficult. The question is no longer how to establish yourself, but how to evolve without losing the reason people followed you in the first place.
That makes the tenth edition something more than an anniversary. It closes the first chapter of The Best Chef while leaving deliberately unanswered what the next one will look like. The “X” works precisely because it does not explain everything yet. It signals movement before revealing the destination. Ten years ago, The Best Chef still had to prove that there was space for another way of talking about chefs. Today, the question is different. The next decade will be about deciding what to do with the community, knowledge and influence that those first ten years created. The story is not starting again. It is simply reaching the point where continuing requires taking another direction.
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