Kazakh Embassy Chef Abdrakhmanov to compete with colleagues from 12 other embassies in Washington for Top Chef

Abdrakhmanov's competitors are the chefs from the embassies of Switzerland, Japan, Norway, China, Georgia, Hungary, Republic of Korea, Morocco, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Jamaica and the Bahamas, Silk Road Newsline reports.

The 2012 Embassy Chef Challenge is supervised by a five-member Culinary Council including Ambassador Capricia Marshall, Chief of Protocol at the U.S. Department of State, and Chef John Hanny, former White House Chef and the author of Secrets From the White House Kitchens.

Hanny began his White House career during the Kennedy administration and served as a visiting chef and advisor to 6 U.S. presidents including Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

This year's culinary competition will be judged by a panel of eight judges including chef Carla Hall who hosts a daily talk show at ABC.

The 2012 Embassy Chef Challenge will take place at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, a federal office building second in size only to the Pentagon.

Last year the Embassy Chef Challenge was held at the kitchen complex of the World Bank headquarters in D.C.

Repeating last year's procedure, the 2012 Embassy Chef Challenge is a two-part competition beginning with a preliminary challenge where all competitors will receive a basket of surprise ingredients and tasked to create a dish on the spot using the ingredients.

The second part of the competition is the open tasting where Washington's cultural and diplomatic communities come together to experience the talents of the competitors who will present a dish of their choice.

Abdrakhmanov has qualified for the Embassy Chef Challenge finals for the second year in a row. Last year, his competition entry, the lamb shashlyk, received high praise from the judges and the U.S. media but it was the chef of the Embassy of Denmark Jan Van Haute who won the top honors with his creamy asparagus soup and roast duck breast with apple and plum chutney.

A graduate of Kazakhstan's Almaty Technology College, Abdrakhmanov has been serving as the chef at the Embassy of Kazakhstan in Washington D.C. since 2010. Prior to his Washington diplomatic posting, he spent a decade as a chef at the Zhalyn restaurant in Almaty.