29-year-old Valencian Vicky Sevilla is chef of Arrels in Sagunto, a small town on the Mediterranean making waves thanks to this young talent. The word ‘arrels’ means ‘roots’, and Sevilla’s style is to create nostalgic dishes from local ingredients, with the intention of feeding her memories to guests. Recent dishes include grilled eel with tarragon hollandaise and fig, bonito with Mediterranean herb granita, and ajo blanco with goose barnacles. Sevilla credits self-sacrifice, vocation, and enthusiasm for her successes so far, and dreams of opening her restaurant in a hotel, so she can feed her friends dinner, have them stay over, and make breakfast the next morning. Count us in!

As executive chef of Zinfandel’s and Le Bistro at the Esplanade Zagreb Hotel, Ana Grgić Tomić is a leading figure in Croatian fine dining. Before returning to her home country, she worked with Yves Mattagne at The Sea Grill in Brussels and Christian Lohse at Fischer’s Fritz in Berlin. During her decade at the helm of the Esplanade, she has made it a dinner destination for gourmet visitors to the city and cooked for dignitaries including President Biden and King Charles, who asked for her risotto recipe. She is also a pioneer of the zero food waste movement in Croatia, making innovative use of whole ingredients in her modern interpretations of classic Croatian and Mediterranean cuisine.

DRC-born chef Hugues Mbenda has named his Marseille restaurant KIN as an abbreviation of the city of his birth, Kinshasa, the place where he developed his taste for cooking and good food, thanks to his mother, Jeanne, who owned a street food café. Today, Mbenda blends local Marseillan produce with African ingredients and the skills learned at the Lycée Escoffier and in top kitchens in Paris and London. Think onion crème brulée with manioc chips, and cacao crumble with passion fruit and cilantro. In 2021, he opened Libala with co-founder Mathilde Godart, and in February 2023 the pair opened KIN, their offering bistronomique with a six-course menu set to change every two weeks.

Tel Aviv’s Raz Rahav has recreated Israeli cuisine for the 21st century with his tasting menu restaurant OCD, where he personally preps and plates each of the 19 courses for the 19 diners seated at his counter. Named on the Forbes Under 30 list at just 25, Rahav is committed to sustainability and seasonality and draws on food and history from across Israel, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean, serving Israeli caviar, Ashkenazi dumplings, buckwheat puffs, miso hummus, bay leaf crème brûlée, and olive oil marmalade. He is as obsessive and compulsive about his menu as he was in 2016, when OCD opened, but don’t expect a buttoned-up atmosphere!