40 world chefs’ broke bread and boundaries at the IIHM International Young Chef Olympiad

40 world chefs’ broke bread and boundaries at the IIHM International Young Chef Olympiad

IIHM’s Kotamsetti Teja took India to the finals of the global event; Albania, England, and Sri Lanka won the top three positions in the largest culinary event of young chefs in the world

KOLKATA, India, Feb. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- After a week of brandishing knives, delivering cuts, and marinating rivalries with sizzle and bake, student chefs, enroute to becoming Michelin stars, all won the world’s biggest culinary competition for student chefs—the IIHM International Young Chef Olympiad 2026. Across 40 countries from almost every continent in the world, they displayed the transformative power of food as a glue that binds humanity.

They broke bread. But they broke something bigger. Boundaries. Yes, there were gold, silver, and bronze winners, who have gone back to their countries, welcomed, embraced, and saluted by governments and institutions. There were 26 kilo trophies carried back with no weight on their shoulders, only a lightness of achievement. Yes, there were some medals. But many more memories.

For the 12th successive year, this Young Chef Olympiad, a brainchild of the visionary Chairman of IIHM, Dr. Suborno Bose, has pulled off the impossible—getting the world to cook collaboratively, display talent of a proportion that secures the future of culinary arts, and build a declared commitment of sharing and collaboration of knowledge from culinary colleges the world over, to preserve global culinary heritage, embracing AI as a tool for learning and time-saving, and fortifying human connections with that time.

The top three who stood as winners on the podium were excellent representatives of the spirit of the Young Chef Olympiad. The others who didn’t get crowned may have missed out narrowly on marks, but stood tall as some of the world’s best.

Like Kotamsetti Satya Teja, a student of IIHM Kolkata from coastal Andhra Pradesh, who showcased his craft in his home kitchen on a stage which had the best teams competing and took India to the finals, making him one of the ten best student chefs in the world. Teja was also awarded for his innovative use of AI for recipe analysis in his culinary ensemble, balancing taste and nutrition, and received the Kitchen Cut Award from top-notch Michelin-star chef John Wood.