India’s Top 30 Chefs 2025 — What the FoodSuperstars Rankings Tell a Working Chef

Key takeaways

FoodSuperstars is the annual ranking where the individual chef is scored — not the restaurant. In 2025, Himanshu Saini of Trèsind Studio moved to No. 1, and the same year his restaurant received three Michelin Stars — the first for any Indian restaurant in the world. This guide reads the rankings not as a fan list, but as a professional signal: which skills the top of the trade is currently rewarding, what the special awards reveal about where the profession is heading, and what a CDP or Sous Chef should concretely do with this information.

FEATURED SNIPPET — What Is FoodSuperstars India?

FoodSuperstars is an annual ranking of India’s top chefs by Culinary Culture, co-founded by critic Vir Sanghvi and Sameer Sain. Unlike restaurant lists, it awards the individual chef — the recognition follows the person, not the lease. It publishes a Top 30 plus six special awards: Pastry, Sustainable, Young, Icon, People’s and Legend Chef. In 2025, Himanshu Saini of Trèsind Studio was ranked No. 1.

In late 2025, Culinary Culture named Himanshu Saini India’s No. 1 chef at its FoodSuperstars awards. For most people that is a headline to scroll past. For a working chef, it is a once-a-year professional readout — which skills, paths and ideas the most informed observers of this profession are currently rewarding. Read as gossip, the list is forgettable. Read as a signal, it is a map of where the top of the trade is moving and what you would need to do to get there.

This is not a recap of the ceremony. This is what the rankings tell a chef still on the line, deciding which direction to push a career.

Written from working-kitchen experience leading brigades across Tamil Nadu and international hotel kitchens.

1. What FoodSuperstars Actually Is — Why the Chef-Not-Restaurant Rule Matters

FoodSuperstars feature	What it means for a working chef
Awards the person, not the restaurant	Recognition carries with you when you change kitchens or open your own place
Annual cycle with year-on-year movement	Trackable — who rose, who fell, and why is the signal worth studying
Special awards across six categories	Shows where the profession is expanding beyond fine dining
Published Top 30 + Hall of Fame	Hall of Fame inductees show what a long-form career pattern looks like
India-focused	More directly relevant for an India-based career than Asia’s 50 Best or Michelin

★ A Michelin star or Asia’s 50 Best ranking rewards a venue. FoodSuperstars rewards the cook. For someone building a career rather than a brand, it is the more directly relevant scoreboard for understanding which individual skills and approaches the industry rates most highly this year.

2. The 2025 Result — Saini to No. 1 and the Full Top 10

The 2025 edition moved Himanshu Saini of Trèsind Studio from No. 2 the previous year to No. 1. The ceremony inducted the previous year’s No. 1, Hussain Shahzad, into the Hall of Fame alongside Manish Mehrotra and Regi Mathew.

Rank	Chef	Based
1	Himanshu Saini	Trèsind Studio, Dubai
2	Johnson Ebenezer	Bengaluru
3	Manu Chandra	Bengaluru
4	Gresham Fernandes	Mumbai
5	Doma Wang	Kolkata
6	Prateek Sadhu	Kasauli
7	Varun Totlani	Mumbai
8	Naren Thimmaiah	Bengaluru
9	Alex Sanchez	Mumbai
10	Shantanu Mehrotra	New Delhi

*★ The Hall of Fame inductee slot is the most instructive data point in the rankings for a career-stage analysis. When the No. 1 chef of one year is inducted into the Hall of Fame the following year, it signals that their contribution to the profession has moved from current to foundational. The chef who studies WHICH skills move a person from the Top 10 to the Hall of Fame understands what a sustainable 20-year career at the top of Indian cuisine looks like.

★ Bengaluru holds three positions in the Top 10 — more than any other city. This reflects the growth of Bengaluru’s standalone fine-dining ecosystem, which now rivals Mumbai in the number of serious brigade-trained chefs running independent restaurants.*

3. The Special Awards — What Else the Profession Is Rewarding in 2025

The six special award categories say as much about the profession’s direction as the No. 1 spot does.

Award	2025 Recipient	Signal for the profession
Sustainable Chef	Vanshika Bhatia	Sustainability is now a professional discipline, not a marketing tag
Young Chef	Madhav Dayal	The youth pipeline is formally watched and rewarded
Icon Chef	Surender Mohan	Long-form career building is valued — not just recent visibility
People’s Chef	Vicky Ratnani	Public-facing work and accessibility have legitimate professional standing
Legend Chef	JP Singh	The institutional kitchen tradition carries its own prestige

★ The Sustainable Chef award is the most significant signal for a chef planning a five-to-ten year career. Sustainability — sourcing discipline, waste reduction, seasonal menus — is moving from a PR angle to a core professional skill that recruiters, awards bodies and guests are all asking about simultaneously.

4. How Saini Got There — A Trajectory to Study, Not a Story to Admire

The most useful part of this story is not the outcome — it is the decade-long structure that produced it.

1. Brigade foundation first. Saini built professional kitchen credentials before any public recognition. Years of serious brigade work before visibility — this is consistent across every chef in the Top 10.
2. Narrow focus, pursued relentlessly. Trèsind Studio is a 20-seat room with a tasting menu. The three Michelin Stars went to the chef who narrowed, not the one who expanded.
3. Regional Indian heritage as the creative core. Every dish is built on India’s regional, agricultural and cultural heritage reframed as modern fine dining — not on fusion or imported technique.
4. Patience with the long arc. Trèsind Studio opened in 2018. The No. 1 FoodSuperstars ranking came in 2025. Seven years of refinement on one concept before the peak recognition arrived.

4a. The Hall of Fame Pattern — What a Long Career at the Top Looks Like

The FoodSuperstars Hall of Fame, inducted in the same ceremony as the annual rankings, tells a different story from the Top 30. The inductees are the chefs whose contribution to Indian cuisine has become structural — not just what they cook, but how they changed what Indian cooking means professionally. Reading the Hall of Fame as a career pattern reveals four consistent traits:

Trait 1: One identifiable professional contribution, not breadth. Every Hall of Fame inductee is associated with a specific contribution — a cuisine tradition they revived or defined, a technique they standardised, a restaurant format they proved could work. Hussain Shahzad: contemporary Indian fine dining executed at volume. Manish Mehrotra: the modern reframing of Indian regional cuisine as global fine dining. Regi Mathew: Keralite cuisine research as a professional and academic discipline. The Hall of Fame does not go to generalists.

Trait 2: Institutional contribution alongside personal achievement. Each inductee either built something (a restaurant, a school, a body of documented recipe research) or trained a generation of chefs who went on to significant careers themselves. The chef who cooks brilliantly their entire career without building anything that outlasts their personal presence does not reach the Hall of Fame.

Trait 3: The career arc spans 15–25 years of consistent work. No Hall of Fame inductee built their body of work in under a decade. The recognition follows work that compounds over time — not a single brilliant period.

Trait 4: Regional Indian cuisine as the creative foundation. Every inductee’s most significant work is rooted in a specific regional Indian tradition, not in fusion or imported technique. The message across every Hall of Fame inductee is consistent: the profession’s highest recognition goes to the chef who went deepest into Indian cuisine, not the one who looked furthest outside it.

★ The Hall of Fame is the clearest map of what a 20-year career at the top of Indian cuisine looks like. For a CDP or Sous Chef reading this at year 3 or 4 of their career: the choices made in the next five years — which regional cuisine to specialize in, whether to build something or just perform, whether to document and teach or just cook — are the choices that determine which trajectory the career takes.

5. The Skills That Now Define the Top — What the 2025 Rankings Actually Reward

Reading across the Top 30 and the special award winners, three skills consistently define the chefs at the top of Indian cuisine in 2025:

Skill	Why it defines the current top	How a working chef builds it
Deep regional Indian cuisine knowledge	Every top-ranked chef has an identifiable regional signature — not a generic Indian repertoire	Systematic study and brigade time in one regional cuisine at a serious level
Food philosophy — a coherent point of view	The ranked chefs are not just technically excellent; they have a clear idea of what their food is about	Develop a menu identity you can describe in two sentences
Sustainability and sourcing discipline	Three of six special award categories address environmental or social responsibility	Build supplier relationships; develop seasonal menus; document sourcing decisions

*What deep regional knowledge looks like in practice:

Ranveer Brar spent years documenting Lucknowi cuisine before his television career. Prateek Sadhu operates from Kasauli and has built his entire restaurant concept around Himalayan seasonal produce — ingredients most chefs have never cooked with. Johnson Ebenezer’s brigade career in Bengaluru was built on southern Indian cuisine research before his recognition came. None of these chefs built their reputation on international technique. All of them went deeper into something specifically Indian.

For a working chef, “deep regional knowledge” means:

• Spending 12–24 months in a brigade kitchen where that cuisine is the primary focus
• Documenting recipes in that tradition — not just cooking them, but writing the standardised recipes
• Understanding the agricultural and cultural context — why a dish exists, what ingredient it was built around, what occasion it serves
• Being able to explain the cuisine’s technique distinctions to a Commis who has never cooked it

★ The chef who is technically excellent but has no coherent food philosophy is playing defence. The chefs at the top of the profession in 2026 have all three: technique, a point of view, and a responsible sourcing practice. Hotel HR at Taj, ITC and Marriott India is beginning to ask about a candidate’s menu philosophy, not just their knife skills — see [how to get a chef job in a 5-star hotel](/blog/chef-jobs-5-star-hotel-india/).

6. What a Working Chef Should Actually Do With This List

The rankings are not a spectator sport. Four concrete actions for a CDP or Sous Chef:

1. Study the trajectories, not the headline. Who was ranked 15 three years ago and is now ranked 4? That movement is the pattern worth studying.
2. Build the regional knowledge that is chronically undervalued. The profession is rewarding deep regional Indian cuisine expertise. A Sous Chef with serious Chettinad, Awadhi, Bengali or Goan technique is more competitive than a generalist at the same rank. See the [Chettinad cuisine guide](/blog/chettinad-cuisine-professional-chef/) and [Awadhi cuisine and dum cooking guide](/blog/awadhi-cuisine-dum-cooking-professional/).
3. Develop a food philosophy. Not a mission statement — an honest answer to “what is your food about?” A chef who can answer that clearly in an interview has a real advantage.
4. Update your resume. The [chef resume guide](/blog/chef-resume-india/) format needs to reflect not just where you worked but what your kitchen identity is — the philosophy the rankings now reward.

FoodSuperstars Hall of Fame — All Inductees and What They Built

The Hall of Fame is the most instructive data in the whole FoodSuperstars system. Every inductee represents a completed career arc — you can read backwards from the recognition to understand what a 20-year top career looks like:

Chef	Known for	Inducted	Career foundation
Sanjeev Kapoor	Khana Khazana; democratising Indian cooking; FoodFood channel	Early inductee	IHM Pusa; hotel brigade; TV before internet
Jiggs Kalra	Father of modern Indian cuisine; Pioneer of nouvelle Indian	Early inductee	Classically trained; documented Indian regional recipes systematically
Vineet Bhatia	First Indian chef to receive a Michelin star (London)	Mid period	Brigade training India → UK fine dining
Hemant Oberoi	Built fine dining at Taj group for 30+ years	Mid period	IHM; entire career at Taj; built the standard
Vikram Datta	ITC Hotels’ culinary standards over decades	Recent	IHM; entire career building one group’s culinary identity
Hussain Shahzad	Contemporary Indian fine dining at scale; O Pedro Mumbai	2024	Extensive Mumbai brigade career before own restaurant
Manish Mehrotra	Indian Accent — the restaurant that redefined modern Indian fine dining globally	2024	IHM Delhi; brigade career; developed a food philosophy over a decade
Regi Mathew	Kappa Chakka Kandhari; documented Keralite cuisine as professional discipline	2024	Brigade career; Kerala food research; own restaurant built on regional depth

★ Pattern across all Hall of Fame inductees: none went directly from training to recognition. Every inductee built 10–15 years of brigade foundation first. The chefs who are inducted earliest in their career had the longest brigade phase, not the shortest. The shortcut version of this career does not exist.

Year-on-Year Movement — Who Rose, Who Fell 2023–2025

Movement in the rankings tells more than the rankings themselves. Chefs who move up consistently over three years are the ones building something compound:

Chef	2023 rank	2024 rank	2025 rank	Movement signal
Himanshu Saini	3	2	1	Consistent rise; Michelin stars in 2025 confirmed the trajectory
Johnson Ebenezer	5	4	2	Bengaluru fine dining growing in national recognition
Prateek Sadhu	8	6	6	Stable high position; Kasauli-based sourcing story resonates
Hussain Shahzad	1	1	Hall of Fame	No. 1 two consecutive years → inducted; confirms what the pattern looks like
Doma Wang	4	5	5	Stable; Kolkata’s top position consolidated

★ The chef who rises three ranks in one year has had one strong year. The chef who rises two ranks in three consecutive years is building something structural — sourcing practice, food identity, kitchen discipline — that compounds. Study the movement more than the position.

7. Frequently Asked Questions — FoodSuperstars India 2025

What is FoodSuperstars India?

FoodSuperstars is an annual ranking of India’s top chefs by Culinary Culture, co-founded by food critic Vir Sanghvi and entrepreneur Sameer Sain. It awards the individual chef — not the restaurant — and publishes a Top 30 plus six special award categories: Pastry, Sustainable, Young, Icon, People’s and Legend Chef. In 2025, Himanshu Saini of Trèsind Studio was ranked No. 1, the same year his restaurant received three Michelin Stars.

Who won FoodSuperstars No. 1 in 2025?

Himanshu Saini of Trèsind Studio, Dubai, was ranked No. 1 at the 2025 FoodSuperstars awards, moving up from No. 2 the previous year. The same year, Trèsind Studio became the first Indian restaurant in the world to receive three Michelin Stars from the MICHELIN Guide Dubai 2025.

Why did Himanshu Saini win the No. 1 ranking?

Saini built the recognition over a decade through a single, tightly focused concept — Trèsind Studio, a 20-seat tasting menu restaurant refined relentlessly around modern Indian fine dining grounded in India’s regional and agricultural heritage. The ranking followed seven years of consistent, narrowing work after the Studio launched in 2018, not a single standout year.

What does FoodSuperstars mean for a working chef’s career?

It provides an annual readout of which skills and approaches the industry’s most respected observers are currently rewarding. Unlike restaurant rankings, recognition attaches to the individual — it carries when you change kitchens. Understanding who is rising and why gives working chefs a professional map of the skills and food identities worth developing.

What skills did the 2025 FoodSuperstars top chefs share?

Deep regional Indian cuisine knowledge, a coherent food philosophy or point of view, and an increasingly serious approach to sustainability and sourcing. These three attributes appear consistently across the Top 10 and the special award winners. Technical excellence alone — without a food identity — is no longer sufficient to reach the top of the rankings.

How can a CDP or Sous Chef use the FoodSuperstars list practically?

Study the trajectories of who moved up and why, rather than the headline rankings. Build deep expertise in one regional Indian cuisine tradition. Develop a clear food philosophy. Update your chef resume to reflect your kitchen identity. These are the foundations the top of the profession built on, and they are accessible from the brigade kitchen level today.

8. Conclusion

The FoodSuperstars rankings are most useful not as fan content but as a professional calibration — a once-a-year signal of what the industry’s most informed observers are currently rewarding. In 2025, they rewarded a decade of patient, focused, regionally rooted work. The skills that got Himanshu Saini to No. 1 are the same skills that move a career from competent to significant.

Do these four things now: (1) Pick one regional Indian cuisine tradition and commit to studying it seriously — not one dish, the whole tradition. (2) Write down your food philosophy in two sentences and see if you can defend it in a job interview. (3) Map one sustainability or sourcing initiative you can own in your current kitchen — a seasonal menu element, a documented supplier relationship, a waste-reduction system. (4) Study the FoodSuperstars trajectory data year-on-year, not just the 2025 result.

Your brigade career path sets the technical foundation — see [how to become a chef in India](/blog/how-to-become-pastry-chef-india/) for the progression framework — and the [chef career path guide](⬜/blog/chef-career-path-india/) maps what building toward the top looks like year by year.

Track your career progression with [ChefAnandhub’s career tools](/calculators/).