Cooking away from home is always a tricky proposition. The produce and kitchen appliances are unfamiliar, but there are also subtler challenges such as humidity and the hardness of the local tap water. Now imagine you’re cooking in another country, in front of a live audience. And you’re up against elite Michelin-level chefs, all of you vying to impress a grand jury made up of some of the most accomplished chefs working today.

This is the S.Pellegrino Young Chef Academy Competition. Held in Milan every two years, the global contest brings together 15 hopefuls who’ve beaten other talented peers at the regional level. They each have five hours to cook a signature dish with help from an assigned mentor from their region, plus two local chefs. It culminates in a nerve-wracking 15-minute presentation, where the grand jury members taste the dish, quiz the chef on their techniques and inspiration, and ultimately crown a single winner.

It sounds a lot like Masterchef, but it’s an entirely separate thing, says Antonia Klugmann, owner of Michelin-starred restaurant L’Argine a Vencò, a former Masterchef Italia judge and, this year, one of seven members of the S.Pellegrino Grand Jury. “TV as a purpose is different from a culinary contest, you know?”

For one thing, chefs have to source all their own ingredients – an obvious advantage for chefs from Italy and Europe. For competitors like Panama’s Gabriela Sarmiento, China’s Ya Min Liu and Australia’s own KyongHo Daniel Choi, getting the right produce to Milan was a huge task in and of itself.

Choi – who was born in Korea and grew up in Ireland – flew over with kimchi and gochujang still fermenting in his luggage, but that was it. Favours were needed to accomplish his Korean-Irish dish of roast pork, Irish black pudding, soondae (Korean black pudding), soda bread, and kimchi and cabbage rolls. The black pudding, for example, was express-freighted by a friend in Dublin, packed in ice. Choi doesn’t speak Italian, so he relied on a fluent chef pal to call around the country and find a respected 65-year-old butcher company to supply the pork.

Simply put: if you don’t have the home-ground advantage, you’d better have a global contact book. “I’ve been so fortunate to travel and make friends everywhere I go,” says Choi, who worked for award-winning chef Corey Lee in San Francisco before relocating to Melbourne and landing a gig at Omnia. Despite this, finding produce that behaves exactly like home was a struggle. For example, the pork Choi received had much thinner skin than he practised with in Australia, meaning less potential for yummy crackling.

Adaptability, then, is another key quality for victory. In the regional competition, Choi took the safe, consistent route of cooking his pork sous-vide, aka low and slow, submerged in water. On the world stage, he and mentor Josh Niland of Sydney fish restaurant Saint Peter made a slightly riskier decision to roast it, bone-in, for better browning and crackling. After countless late-night texts and 12 hours preparing together in person, this was one of many small but crucial tweaks the duo made to the dish, which under the rules couldn’t change ingredients.

“A lot of my role, I felt like it was an editor, trying to take things away because there was a bit too much clutter,” Niland says. “Having started out cooking when I was 15, there’s a lot of good experiences I’ve maybe had that can help other people. I genuinely love that part of my job.”

Composure is also vital in a competition like this, and that – alongside endurance – is a quality Niland says he saw right away while judging Choi at the regional level. “The second it started, this guy was like Usain Bolt out of the gate, running. And running in a way that wasn’t frantic, but it was more like, ‘If I don't make this cut at this speed, I know I’m not going to make it.’ Everything was very calculated,” Niland says. “And the thing that was most impressive was, he never slowed down. I was waiting for the peak and decline. But at no point did he slow down.”

Years of cooking experience, the right ingredients, a good plan, adaptability, composure and endurance are all well and good, but when it comes down to it, all that matters at the S.Pellegrino Young Chef Academy Competition is the judges, and meeting them where their palates are.

“We talk a lot about exactly what it takes to win,” says Klugmann, speaking for the grand jury. “It’s a complex mix of things. Techniques, flavour, personality. When I eat a dish from those young people, I want to be surprised … for me it’s very important that it be [located] in a place, in a time, and I want to see the hand of the people that are behind the dish.

”“First, the character needs to come out,” says renowned Hong Kong chef Vicky Lau, who was a judge two years ago and this year returned to mentor a young chef. “You need to have a central message. And then it’s technique, and how you present yourself.”

In the end, the contestant who did that better than anyone in 2025 was Lau’s mentee, Ardy Ferguson. The Indonesian-born, Hong Kong-based chef took home the top prize with Archipelago Celebration, an homage to both locations that featured Cantonese-style duck breast and a spicy coconut gravy served on a plate hand-carved in Bali. Each judge dug in with bespoke cutlery that featured coconut-husk handles.

The room erupted on the third night when host Jay Rayner announced Ferguson’s name at a gala dinner. He was quickly hoisted aloft by his fellow competitors in a show of genuine joy.

“The best thing about hospitality is you make friends everywhere,” Choi says. “I’ll try and keep in touch with some of the other competitors. There hasn’t been any ego or anything from anyone. Everyone’s been really nice. Everyone was just happy to be there.”

“What I said to the contestants is that they really have to enjoy the journey, because this is not like a normal experience for young chefs,” Klugmann says. “This is something out of the ordinary, you know, extraordinary. So, they have to enjoy the process and to connect with one another, because that will last for their lives, the connections they make.”

This article is produced in partnership with S.Pellegrino. The writer attended the S.Pellegrino Young Chef Academy Competition in Milan as a guest of the brand.