Time Out’s Best Young Chefs in Los Angeles right now

Growing up in Woodland Hills, Yazeed Soudani always relished family trips to visit relatives in Amman, Jordan, where he developed a taste for juicy, perfectly cooked Jordanian-style chicken shawarma, piled atop a heap of golden fries or rolled inside of a fluffy, freshly made piece of saj (a type of Arabic flatbread). It wasn’t until the tragic passing of his father in 2022, however, that Soudani began to consider a culinary career. Before he knew it, the San Fernando Valley native had quit his job as a financial advisor and spent six months in Amman, training and learning from some of the city’s best shawarma specialists. By the following summer, Soudani debuted Miya Miya (which roughly translates to “perfect” in Arabic) as a backyard pop-up in West Hills before landing a weekly residency at Smorgasburg by the start of 2024. While launching the concept, Soudani also worked as a private chef on and off for a year, making everything from spicy tuna rice cakes to A5 Wagyu carpaccio.

Of course, Soudani’s success didn’t stop there. By the end of last year, former Time Out editor and current Los Angeles Times reporter Stephanie Breijo had named Miya Miya’s chicken shawarma one of the best dishes of 2024. Since then, Miya Miya has gone viral on social media several times over, spawned pale imitations all over the city and announced plans for a brick-and-mortar at the new West Edge, which is slated to also be the new home of Virgil Village’s Thai-Japanese tasting menu Kinkan by mid-2026. Until Miya Miya’s official storefront opens its doors, you can find Soudani popping up at the West L.A. mixed-use development every Friday at 4:30pm, drawing hundreds of eager customers willing to wait up to three hours in line for a taste of the city’s best shawarma. If you can’t wait that long, Soudani says your best bet is still pounding the pavement on a Sunday morning at Smorgasburg.

For many of us, the pandemic turned our worlds inside out and upside down. For Ashley Cunningham, however, stay-at-home orders catapulted the Sylmar native’s culinary career through au courant social media virality. In 2021, the Art Institute of North Hollywood culinary graduate began posting on TikTok and Instagram, sharing stories about her life working as a private chef for an NBA player. Previously, Cunningham had worked as a private chef for a USC sorority, as well as in a corporate culinary role, where she first fell in love with the art of baking. Over time, she slowly amassed a social media fanbase of over 600,000 followers eager to tune in to her honest accounts of 13-hour workdays and other personal musings. After her client was traded to another team, Cunningham began selling homemade cookies and cakes online full-time under the name Bad Ash Bakes, shipping her baked goods all over the country from a commercial kitchen space while also picking up the occasional private chef gig. 

Cunningham could have kept Bad Ash Bakes as a cottage bakery, but she knew she wanted more. Halfway through 2024, after her commercial lease was up for renewal, the classically trained chef stumbled across a modestly sized Pasadena bakery space on Loopnet and decided to sign on it. In the process, she maxed out every single credit card she owned. After Cunningham spent months perfecting the menu, the Bad Ash Bakes brick-and-mortar opened this May to near-immediate long lines—a product of her cookies’ pre-existing online fanbase. Since then, Cunningham has won over area locals, as well as the owner of neighboring Black-owned bakery Sweet Red Peach, with her not-too-sweet cinnamon rolls, pitch-perfect banana pudding and homestyle slices of cake. Another source of delight at Bad Ash Bakes? The delicious espresso and matcha drinks, the latter made with bright green ceremonial-grade product that Cunningham herself flew to Japan to track down earlier this year. 

When Sarah Durning first moved to L.A. at the age of 21, she had her sights set on making a name for herself in L.A.’s eclectic, wide-ranging restaurant scene. For the first few years, the Chicagoland native honed her cooking skills at Croft Alley, an independent daytime café with locations in Beverly Hills and Downtown L.A. that serves grain bowls, tartines, sandwiches and other breezy all-day fare. After a brief but meaningful stint at Margot in Culver City—shout out to the restaurant’s talented line cooks—Durning accepted a role at Santa Monica farm-to-table pioneer Rustic Canyon, whose kitchen was operating under then-executive chef Andy Doubrava. “Working at Rustic was the best decision I could have made [at the time],” Durning says, adding that working in the farm-to-table restaurant’s kitchen has been one of the most formative experiences of her career.

From there, Durning decided to delve into the raw, unfiltered world of butchery via a role at Gwen, Curtis Stone’s Michelin-starred steakhouse and butcher shop, where she mastered charcuterie and cutting pork, beef and lamb. The experience cemented Durning’s interest in regenerative agriculture and tip-to-tail butchery. But when fellow Rustic Canyon alum Erika Chan announced she was leaving Dunsmoor and vouched for Durning to replace her as pastry chef in 2023, she knew she couldn’t say no. Why, you may ask? The critically acclaimed Glassell Park restaurant cooks food using a colonial-style open hearth, eschews modern-day kitchen appliances and prepares essentially everything by hand or with rudimentary tools—which Durning saw as both a challenge and an opportunity to learn. 

Since then, she’s won over legions of diners with her decadent takes on chocolate cake and sticky toffee pudding, plus seasonal delights like citrus chess pie and housemade ice cream. Unfortunately for those of us who have enjoyed Durning’s desserts at Dunsmoor, however, the talented chef is ready for her next act: chef de cuisine at Wilde’s, a buzzy Los Feliz restaurant slated to open at the end of October. Under executive chef Natasha Price, Durning will oversee the British-inspired menu’s pastry program and be able to return to the tip-to-tail butchery she loves—a role that combines both her culinary interests.