5 Inspiring Chefs Who Had an Amazing Year in 2016

No big deal — Dominique Crenn was crowned the world's best female chef this year. While she admits the title isn't exactly ideal, telling POPSUGAR in an interview, "Perhaps in a few years, I hope it will just be 'chef' and not 'woman chef,'" it's an accomplishment worth celebrating. The French chef, who owns restaurants Atelier Crenn and Petit Crenn in San Francisco, is known for her innovative and artistic style of cooking and menus written as poems. Anyone interested in the life of a chef should watch her incredibly compelling episode of Chef's Table on Netflix.

Anthony Bourdain turned 60 this year, and he's just as unstoppable as ever. The Parts Unknown host wrote Appetites: A Cookbook, his first cookbook in more than 10 years; he traveled the country for a North American tour of his live show called The Hunger; he dined with President Obama in Vietnam; and he released new details about his new Bourdain Market in NYC. On a less happy note, Anthony and his wife Ottavia Busia split after nine years of marriage, but there's no animosity between the parents. "Nothing has changed. We love each other. We respect the decisions the other has made. And we'll always consider ourselves a family," Ottavia reportedly said.

Carla Hall, cohost of ABC's The Chew, is a seriously talented Southern chef whose very first restaurant, Carla Hall's Southern Kitchen, opened in Brooklyn this year. Her back-to-basics menu includes fried chicken, pimento cheese, chow chow relish, buttermilk biscuits, collard greens, and more Southern staples. The Top Chef finalist also became a culinary ambassador for the North Star Cafe in the Smithsonian National Museum of African-American History and Culture. "How often can you say that you're actually a part of such an important place that everybody from all over the country is going to come and see?" Carla told The Washington Post.

Everyone's favorite orange-Crocs-wearing chef, Mario Batali, had one hell of a year. In between cohosting The Chew, Mario found time to write his 10th cookbook, Big American Cookbook: 250 Favorite Recipes From Across the USA, host a dinner with Gwyneth Paltrow, team up with Chrissy Teigen at NYC's Food and Wine Festival, and most impressive of all, cook the menu for the Obamas' last state dinner.

This year, Gordon Ramsay did something he's never done before: he released a mobile game called Gordon Ramsay Dash. The fast-paced and seriously addictive game allows you to build your own restaurant empire all while being called Gordon-style names if you make a mistake, like "f*cking doughnut," by the chef himself. Gordon also added to his ever-growing list of restaurants — 30 and counting — with the introduction of Fish and Chips, a takeaway-style British restaurant in Las Vegas.