Lidia’s Danica Pollard is in the running for Food + Wine’s best new pastry chef

• Matt Kocourek
• Vote Pollard.

Food + Wine’s annual list of the best new chefs in the country is the kind of list that can act as a springboard for the careers of rising cooks, raising their profiles to help them find funding for restaurants of their own or appearances on one of the multitudes of cooking shows. And so while Danica Pollard, the pastry chef at Lidia’s Kansas City, doesn’t want to get too excited about her current lead in an online contest to determine The People’s Best New Pastry Chef, being sponsored by Food + Wine, she is … way too excited about it.

“I remember when I was 20 and just starting out in the restaurant business. I would look at the best new chef’s article in Food + Wine each year. I always had it in the back of my mind that it would be the most amazing thing ever to be on that list. And now I have a shot at something that’s always been my dream,” Pollard says.