Chef League1
Read the dish
A real recipe, a flavor problem, and a chef’s review with the clue in it. “Bright acidity. What vegetable dish could it complement?”
Learn to think in flavor.
Chef League is a game about fixing dishes. It contains recipe challenges and ingredient challenges. Each recipe challenge is a real recipe with a flavor problem. You pick the ingredient that makes it better, chefs and other players judge the result, and after a while you can improvise without a recipe.
Download on theApp Store
Free · iPhone · iOS 14 or later
★★★★★ 4.5 on the App Store · Watch the trailer (27 seconds)
Featured Press
“A game (if we can even call it that) that utterly defies categorization. You won’t find anything else quite like it.”
TapSmart
- VentureBeat — “Chef League challenges you to improvise like the pros”
- The Spoon — The Food Tech Show: “Mapping the Flavor Genome”
- HackerNoon — “A new app is transforming learning through AI”
- Harvard University — “Cooking up an educational competition”
How it works
Reality Chef Competition Recipe Challenges
A challenge takes a couple of minutes. Getting good takes a season.
2
Pick the fix
Every ingredient is scored on seven flavor dimensions. Choose the one the dish is missing, not the one you like most.
- Sweet
- Sour
- Bitter
- Rich
- Spicy
- Crisp
- Savory
3
Get judged
In-game chefs score your fix and players vote on the best ones. Beat a chef and you take their premium ingredients. Win votes and you climb the leaderboard.
The data
Scored the way chefs taste.
The scoring comes from the Flavor Genome Project, which started in Beth Altringer Eagle’s lab at Harvard in 2015 and has processed over a billion data points since then. The project uses both qualitative and quantitative methods to study how chefs and professionals like sommeliers, farmers, plant breeders and judges of flavor competitions evaluate flavor and create and compose flavors. When the game evaluates flavor fixes, it evaluates against this scoring system as well as player community scores, meaning there are multiple ways to win challenges.
“The very idea of breaking down the characteristics of wine and its flavor into highly descriptive and well understood categories was a revelation to Altringer, so much so she eventually began to think about the idea of applying this systematic and analytical approach to flavor to almost any type of food.”
Michael Wolf, The Spoon
- Real recipes, real problemsHundreds of challenges, each built from a dish that needed something.
- Chef reviews as cluesEvery challenge carries a review that points at the fix without naming it.
- Ingredient challengesTest your taste memory: guess an ingredient’s seven-dimension profile, then see the real one.
- A cookbook you buildYour best fixes and the ingredients you have earned, kept.
Updates
Hear when new challenges land.
An occasional note from the studio: new seasons of challenges, the next version, and what the flavor research turns up. A few times a year, never more.
Free on the App Store.
Play a challenge a day. In-app purchases are optional and never required to learn.