Game aspects: I want to address some of the issues I've heard people bring up about Game Chef in the past, but work to keep from excluding any of the people who currently enjoy participating. I think it's important to arrange feedback groups based on native language, both to keep people from complaining about having to read games in bad English and also to allow people to express their feedback in as clear a way as possible to each other, and lower one more barrier to real support from your group. 

I also want to bring winning back: each feedback group would anonymously vote for which game from their group would move on to the next round of judging, and then the judges would only read those games. You'd have to do your review (I'd cut it down to one review in order to make people more likely to fulfill that requirement) in order to be eligible to win. I'd try to get a volunteer judge from every major language group represented by Game Chef; if that didn't happen (as I'm guessing it might not), there'd just be one feedback group for each of the non-English languages, and the ones voted for in that category would win "Best [Language] game."

I'd keep the secret ingredients, but make them less like a tasting menu: no "you can choose this list, or this list, or two words from this list and this mechanical theme." There'd be one set of ingredients. There might be an additional constraint, but it'd probably be just the list.