Chefs. We know they shine in the kitchen. Otherwise, they’d have to find another day job. But as many of Austin’s well-loved chefs have come into their own in the past few years, a few standout characteristics have defined them as a little something more than what you read everyday on their restaurant menu. Here’s a look at how we see some of the city’s top chefs.

The Innovators

The innovators may be masters with food, but they always seem to have their focus on the future. What’s next for the Austin food scene? Where do they see a new opportunity? These chefs may have a heart for food, but they also have a head for business.

Though many have called LARRY McGUIRE'S restaurants, Lamberts Downtown Barbecue and Perla’s Seafood and Oyster Bar, chef-driven concepts, McGuire would be the first to admit, that he’s driven by all of the little details, from food to restaurant layout, art and décor, down to the little votive candles selected for each table.

“Part of it is that I think I’m just antsy. I’m constantly thinking about restaurant ideas and what Austin doesn’t have yet,” says McGuire. “I love being a chef, but it’s just not me to stay in the kitchen every night. I’m interested in all of it, from food to interior design, and creating restaurants is a great medium for me to incorporate all of my interests.”

McGuire is currently working with hotelier Liz Lambert to design and build a food and beverage program for Lambert’s Hotel Havana in San Antonio to create snack, lunch and a new room-service breakfast menu. Due out this summer, McGuire and his partners will open Elizabeth Street, a French-Vietnamese inspired restaurant serving classic Vietnamese dishes including bánh mi sandwiches, pho and bun.

In McGuire’s case, there’s no rest for the weary, something chef SHAWN CIRKIEL can relate to. Having been one of the youngest chefs to bring a five-star restaurant to Austin in Jean-Luc’s, a French gastropub (before there even were gastro-pubs) in 2002, Cirkiel has endeavored to work in famed kitchens such as Café Boulud, Domaine Chandon, Uchi and the James Beard House in New York City. But with the opening of Parkside, a new gastro-pub concept on East Sixth Street, people were not so sure this upscale eatery complete with a raw oyster bar was a fit for the often tawdry side of Austin’s entertainment district. But Cirkiel has a vision for that side of town that includes a full-scale renaissance for this historic area.

As one of the board members for the Sixth Street Austin Association, which is working to raise funds to restore the district to enhance its historic character and re-brand the area as an inviting Austin destination, Cirkiel renovated Parkside to expose the best of its historic appeal. He so believes in this eventual revitalization that he staked his second restaurant concept just adjacent to Parkside. Backspace opened in late 2010 to an eager fan-base salivating over delectable brick-oven specialty pizzas and handmade charcuterie. Though Cirkiel has not yet revealed his next big project, his ideas are in the works for another great eatery in a separate location.

The Fishmongers

Among the many restaurants in town, many serve great seafood. But few chefs have really earned the title “fishmonger” quite like PAUL QUI and Shane Stark. Qui, the former chef de cuisine at Uchi and current executive chef at Uchiko, one of the top new restaurants to open in Austin in 2010 according to Esquire and Texas Monthly, Qui might never have found his passion for slicing up some of the world’s most exotic fish if not for his first introduction to Uchi with a friend almost five years ago. From first bite, Qui was determined to work for executive chef Tyson Cole. (So determined that he offeredto work at Uchi for free.) Having graduated from the Texas Culinary Academy in 2003, Qui already had a cadre of culinary skill at his disposal, as well as a sophisticated palate and a well of untapped creativity that began to reveal itself with each new challenge he received from Cole. Within a short while, Qui had more than proved himself as Cole’s protégé and was given the role of executive chef at Uchiko from the very beginning.

Though he pulls from a world of culinary experience including that of his Filipino heritage and works with a wild array of proteins and vegetables, Qui is a master with fish. And his daily selections from Tokyo’s Tsukiji Fish Market prove it. Though he has worked with his fair share of tuna and salmon, Qui loves to serve and eat mackerel, black bass, sea urchin and ishidai (striped beak-perch). “I like ishidai because they mainly eat sea urchin, which makes them taste just like sea urchin,” says Qui.

Having worked under celebrated seafood chef Shane Stark at Paggi House, BEN "CHILI" HUDDLESTON recently took the helm of the restaurant as executive chef. With seafood as his preferred protein of choice, Huddleston not only uses as much fresh catch from the Texas coast as possible for his daily menus, but he’s also an avid angler himself. He particular loves fishing shallow coastal waters and bay fishing.

“I love using fish because it’s so delicate,” says Huddleston who loves working with Tilefish for its great texture and flavor. “You really have to use exact precision when you cook, handle and flavor it.”

The Locavores & Nose-to-Tailers

We all know it’s environmentally friendly, health-conscious and ironically chic, for chefs to use quality, locallygrown or -made ingredients. And Austin is certainly benefiting from this new culinary perspective. But long before well-liked Bryce Gilmore was serving up local delights from the Odd Duck trailer, restaurants such as Zoot, Wink and Vespaio were doing their best to use local fare. It wasn’t until just a few years ago that a few local chefs took eating local, and wasting as little as possible, to a whole new level.

Take JESSE GRIFFITHS for example. Though not the chef of a traditional brick and mortar restaurant, Griffiths’ wildly popular Dai Due Supper Club is at its heart, a statement about how we should eat. (Just read Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and you’ll know exactly where Griffiths is coming from.) If it’s not in season, he won’t use it. (Not even onions!) And if he’s going to butcher a hog, you better believe he’s going to use the whole thing — hooves, snout, ears and all. He even holds clinics for interested guests to learn how to roast and use a whole pig, as well as a hunting course on killing, skinning, gutting and preparing a Texas whitetail deer.

But Griffiths isn’t alone. Gilmore of Odd Duck and Barley Swine and James Holmes of Olivia take this creed to heart when preparing their menus. And as Austin’s culinary palate expands, so does its acceptance of items such as pickled pig’s ear, lamb fries (fried lamb testicles) and more local beet and kale side dishes.

You’ll also see it at Foreign & Domestic where NED ELLIOT and his wife Jodi aim to create dishes that are familiar and approachable while using ingredients that may push some boundaries with unexpected textures and flavors. It’s not unusual to find venison heart tartar or crispy beef tongue on the menu here. Having worked under some of the most renowned New York chefs and also having been influenced by the creative energy and diversity after a few years in Portland, the Elliotts were excited to share this combination of experiences with Austin. And with chefs like Griffiths, Holmes and Gilmore, the Elliotts are certainly in good company.

The Mad Scientists

Though it’s probably not fair to call them “mad,” it’s completely fair to identify these chefs as unbelievably creative. These chefs are the first to have the latest gadgets, and they aren’t afraid to change a food’s original form by dehydrating, compressing or smoking it, using a circulator for sous-vide cooking or using liquid nitrogen for flash freezing. What may sound straightforward on a menu rarely looks like what you envisioned when it arrives on your plate. But the end result is usually even better than you imagined. This is what chefs like JOSH WATKINS at the Carillon do everyday. Though Watkins will be the first to say that his overall direction isn’t simply molecular gastronomy for the sake of shock value. Instead, his priority has always been improving something simple like steak and potatoes by making “small, subtle tweaks.” And if you’ve never had his version of foie gras mousse or pork sous-vide with fried green apples and sage cream, you don’t know what you’re missing.

But perhaps even more intriguing are the methods PHILIP SPEER uses to design desserts at Uchi and Uchiko. Though he contributes just as much to the entire menu of the sister restaurants, Speer’s background is in the pastry world. And as a pastry chef, Speer has an undeniable sweet tooth. Even though he makes abstract dessert creations that often look like they arrived from the moon, Speer admits he loves all types of sweets, not just the ones that appear to be from another planet.

“It’s really about taking something and making it not what it seems. Because I do love to eat carrot cake, red velvet cake and chocolate-chip cookies,” says Speer. “But you can’t follow up a four-star sushi meal with just a cookie and milk.”

Instead Speer gets creative. “It’s fun to create something that evokes memories of childhood and put it in a form that’s beautiful and artistic,” says Speer. “A lot of my inspiration comes from my kids and my surroundings. One of Uchi’s best-selling desserts of all time came from my daughter’s sack lunch. The peanut butter semi-freddo. It’s apples, raisins and peanut butter. You can’t get more basic than that and yet that’s not what you see when it’s served to you at Uchi.

The Perfectionists

In Uchi: The Cookbook, TYSON COLE says that if there is one word he would use to define himself, it would be: perfectionist. Fitting for the owner of two highly acclaimed restaurants with four James Beard semi-finalist nominations, a Food & Wine magazine Best New Chef in America title, a shot at Iron Chef America, and a slew of media accolades to his name. But Cole’s perfectionism is not a self-centered egomaniacal ambition. It’s more about challenging himself and his staff to always do better —to take the amazing ingredients they work with and bring out the very best in them — and always making the people who eat at his restaurants feel right at home.

It’s something he’s so passionate about that he makes it seem almost effortless, a talent he shares with longtime Austin great, DAVID BULL. Having been at the helm of some of the state’s most prized historic restaurants including The Mansion at Turtle Creek, The Driskill and the Stoneleigh in Dallas, Bull, like Tyson has also racked up quite a bit of praise including the same Food & Wine accolade (different year), an Iron Chef America dual with Bobby Flay, and a James Beard award. Throughout Texas, Chef Bull is known for his innovative-yet-classic New American cuisine.

But Bull has been out of the Austin limelight for a few years, working on historic hotel projects in Dallas. It wasn’t until 2010 that he returned to the dining scene with two new concepts and a classic bar to bridge them in the new Austonian highrise: Congress and Second Bar + Kitchen. Congress restaurant is Bull’s intimate white tablecloth, fine dining outlet, while Second Bar + Kitchen is his upscale diner concept featuring an array of great beers, elevated bar food and a laidback feel. For Bull, everything he does is deliberate, delivering the best food from each of his restaurants with meticulous skill. (He’s even rallied members from his former staff at the Driskill to help him achieve this goal.)

And while opening a white tablecloth establishment in the heart of downtown may seem daunting, Bull admits he felt the most pressure with Second Bar + Kitchen. “It’s actually one of the most challenging opportunities in my career so far,” says Bull. “To create a casual restaurant after being in fine dining for so long is unique in that everybody has an expectation from you of a certain type of food like a hamburger or a pizza. There are incredible burgers and pizzas in this city, so when we work with a concept like this, everything has to be right 100 percent of the time.”

Together, Cole and Bull have raised the bar for what Austin, and the rest of the world, should expect from its food scene. From good business sense and local fare, to pushing the boundaries of creativity, these are the chefs who have set the stage for the “innovators” like McGuire and Cirkiel to raise the bar higher; laid out a blank canvas for the creativity of Speer and Watkins to thrive; and opened both the local and global landscape of produce and purveyors for the likes of Qui, Stark, Griffiths, Ned Elliott and the myriad other talented chefs in town to make Austin one of the top-tiered cities in the country for dining.