The Chef Culinary Conference is back in person, and with it comes our fun cooking competition. We’ve done Iron Chef and Cutthroat Kitchen. Now we’re introducing The Tournament of Champions: Chef Conference Edition. Celebrity Chef Jet Tila is back and will guide our brave culinary competitors through the trials and tribulations of this very fun and challenging cooking competition.

Here are the basics: The competition will follow similar guidelines as the Food Network Competition. There will be 2 rounds. Round 1 is on Sunday, June 5th with the Championship Round being on Monday June 6th. The competition will feature 6 teams, 2 players per teams. Each team will be seeded randomly at the start of the competition. The top 2 seeds (Team 1 and 2) will automatically get fast tracked to the Championship round. Team 3, 4, 5 and 6 will compete in round 1. The 2 teams with the highest scores will move onto the Championship Round. In the Championship Round, the team with the highest score will be crowned winner.

Like the version of the show on Food Network, there will be 5 randomizer wheels. Each wheel will feature a particular category with 12 options per wheel. The categories are Protein, Produce, Equipment, Cooking Style, and Sponsor that will feature items from sponsors of the event. The wheels will be spun and whatever item is landed on will need to be used by each team. For instance, you could land on Salmon for Protein, Black Garlic for Produce, Blow Torch for equipment, Peppery for Cooking Style and the Wonderful Company for Sponsor. In this case, each team will need to create their dish with each of those included.

Each round will have 30 minutes for cooking. Each team will need to prepare 3 identical dishes, 2 for the judges and 1 display plate. There will be 4 judges.

The winning team will receive a championship belt, $500 and bragging rights for the year.

If you are interested in competing, please reach out to Tournament of Champions project manager Christopher Howland [email protected]