Eater's Hottest Chef Day 2013 Starts Right NOW

It's that time again. To honor the hallowed holiday of Valentine's Day, we're heating things up at Eater with our annual Hottest Chef Competition. As per usual, the city's sexiest male and female culinary artists are geared up to battle it out tournament-style — all to crown a winner that'll represent Portland in Eater National's effort to find this country's hottest chef. But this year, instead of a week-long sexyfest, the contest will be a one-day, all-day free-for-all.

Here's how it works. All week, Eater has solicited nominations for Portland's hottest chefs, and those names and photos have been seeded and ranked. Starting at 10:30a.m. — a scant half-hour from now — voting will begin in four preliminary rounds, with a new round of polling unleashed onto the site every 20 minutes. Voting on all preliminary rounds (regardless of what time they dropped) will continue until 1:30p.m. At that time, four finalists — the last-chefs-standing of each round — will battle it out against each other in the finals, which will go live at 2p.m.

Voting in the Hottest Chef finals will continue until 5p.m., at which point we'll be ready to announce Portland's hottest.

** Now updated, with live links to all the polls**

Round One:
Pascal Sauton (MIlwaukie Kitchen & Wine)
Ryan Bleibtrey (The Original)
John Kincaid (Tapalaya)
Dustin Clark (Wildwood)
Jason French (Ned Ludd)

Round Two:
Deb Serkoian (Wilf's Restaurant)
Ethan Flom (Farmhouse Cafe)
Ken Norris (Riffle NW)
Ben Bettinger (Imperial, Portland Penny Diner)
Adam Sappington (The Country Cat)

Round Three:
Chris Paquette (Bamboo Sushi)
John Gorham (Toro Bravo, Tasty N Sons, Tasty N Alder)
Danielle Pruett (Clyde Common)
Alex Yoder (Olympic Provisions SE)
Nong Poonsukwattana (Nong's Khao Man Gai)

Round Four:
Lawrence "Rocky" Smith (Paragon)
Anthony Walton (Beaker & Flask)
Amelia Lane (Olympic Provisions)
Jake Martin (Genoa)
Justin Woodward (Castagna)

Fair warning: Eater's dedicating this day-of-love almost exclusively to sexy chefs. If that's not your thing, there's a ton of other food-relatedV-Day coverage out there: last-minute gifts and reservations (good luck with that), foods to put you "in the mood." But if you'd prefer to ogle the hotties who can also cook up a hot Valentine's dinner, welcome. This should be fun.