Pavyllon chef and sommelier win Gosset Matchmakers 2026
Tadhg McCabe of Pavyllon London and Jack Stalker of Restaurant St Barts took the Champagne house's chef-sommelier title with duck and Loch Duart salmon.
Chef Tadhg McCabe of Pavyllon London and sommelier Jack Stalker of Restaurant St Barts have won Gosset Matchmakers 2026, the Champagne house's annual competition pairing young chefs with young sommeliers.
Now in its 11th year, Gosset Matchmakers is open only to chefs and sommeliers with fewer than five years of professional experience, judged on how well a dish and a Champagne are matched rather than on either discipline alone. McCabe and Stalker entered as a pair who already knew each other's palates: both had worked together under chef Rob Roy Cameron at the Spanish restaurant Alta before moving on to their current kitchens.
Two rounds, two pairings
Duck and peach against Blanc de Blancs is easy; the mystery ingredient round is where a real pairing shows.
In the first round, the pair built a dish of duck with green Sichuan peppercorn and peach, judged a balanced match for Gosset's Blanc de Blancs. The second round handed every finalist the same mystery ingredient, Loch Duart salmon, to pair on the spot; McCabe and Stalker matched it to Gosset's Zero Dosage, a Champagne made without dosage sugar that leaves less room for a pairing to hide behind sweetness. Judges praised the two as a natural team, citing confident service and technical execution across both rounds. The mystery-ingredient round is the format's real test: a rehearsed dish can be matched to a Champagne in advance, but pairing a fish cooked to a brief on the day leaves no room to fall back on a pairing worked out weeks earlier.
Why the format rewards the pairing over the plate
The competition sits alongside a small run of early-career prizes built specifically for staff still a few years into the trade, among them the Craft Guild's Graduate Award, rather than the more familiar chef-only contests. For a sommelier, the win is harder currency than a chef's: wine lists that reward genuine pairing knowledge over sheer length are exactly the kind Gosset is betting its competition can produce, a shift already visible in how wine lists elsewhere in Europe are being edited down and sharpened rather than simply expanded.
Gosset has not said whether McCabe and Stalker will take on any formal ambassador role for the house, and both remain in their current posts at Pavyllon London and Restaurant St Barts.
