Tacoma — Seattle is home to one of best new chefs in America, according to Food & Wine magazine’s annual Best New Chefs list: Aisha Ibrahim. The 35th-annual list was released on Sept. 12. In addition to Ibrahim, only 10 other chefs were named.
37-year-old Ibrahim is executive chef at Canlis, a renowned fine-dining restaurant located in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood.
Ibrahim became Canlis’ seventh executive chef in 2021 and is the first woman to hold this position in the restaurant’s more than 70-year history. She was brought in to Canlis after it lost its chef, Brady Williams, who was also named one of Food & Wine’s best new chefs in 2018.
Ibrahim didn’t always aspire to be a chef. Before deciding to attend Le Cordon Bleu in San Francisco, she was studying at Elon University in North Carolina on a basketball scholarship until an injury sidelined her.
Prior to moving to Seattle and working at Canlis, the Philippines-born, West Virginia-raised chef worked at various well-known restaurants around the world. She was planning open her very own restaurant in Bangkok, but then the pandemic hit.
Ibrahim worked as a sous chef at Manresa in Los Gatos, California, she moved to the Basque region of Spain to work for Eneko Atxa at the three-Michelin-starred Azurmendi. She then moved to Thailand and was the chef de cuisine at Aziamendi, Azurmendi’s sister restaurant.
Ibrahim is “bringing the tasting-menu format back to the iconic fine-dining restaurant,” according to the Food & Wine Magazine article.
Ibrahim is now part of the 2023 class of best new chefs that includes other restaurant industry rising stars from Philadelphia, Washington D.C., St. Louis, Miami, Los Angeles, New York, Houston and Austin. They are all focused on being more intentional about why they do what they do, according to Food & Wine writer Khushbu Shah.
