The James Beard Foundation Awards were presented last evening in a black-tie ceremony at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall in New York. San Francisco’s Boulevard was named Outstanding Restaurant and Daniel Humm of Eleven Madison Park in New York was cited as 2012’s Outstanding Chef. Next, Grant Achatz’s Chicago concept that changes its focus to a different part of the world every few months (and sells tickets to dinner rather than taking reservations), was named Best New Restaurant.
The only surprise of the evening came in the Best Chef South category, in which Florida competes.
(At least Florida is included in theory; Sunshine State chefs are infrequently on the list of finalists.) This year, of the five finalists, four were from New Orleans. The only outlier was Chris Hastings of the Hot and Hot Fish Club in Birmingham, Ala. The surprise? Hastings beat out the Crescent City boys club.
For a complete list of winners, click this link to go to JamesBeard.org.
I chose not to attend the ceremony — and the attendant food and drink parties — this year. Although I am a judge and generally appreciate the good work the Beard Foundation does as an educational entity, I believe the award program is flawed and skews too heavily toward well-known chefs in large cities. Every few years, Florida has a representative on the list of finalists for Best Chef South region, but it’s almost always someone from Miami. Norman Van Aken, whose Norman’s is the signature restaurant at the Ritz-Carlton Grande Lakes in Orlando, is a past winner, but he was cited when he still had the Norman’s in Coral Gables.
As a judge, I’ve tasted the food of many of the winning chefs over the years, and I’ve dined in their restaurants. And I know that we have chefs here in Central Florida every bit as deserving of the recognition. But in order for a judge to vote for one of our chefs, he or she has to eat their food. The judges are not assigned to visit nominated chefs, we simply vote on the ones that we’re familiar with. And not enough judges are familiar with the fine work of our top chefs. Or, when presented with the ballot, judges vote for a chef whose food they had perhaps years ago, without knowing how it compares to other nominees.
What’s the solution? Ideally, there would be a panel of judges that would eat at the nominated restaurants. But the nonprofit Beard Foundation isn’t likely to pay for that to happen.
The best we can do is continue to promote our chefs and hope that whenever judges visit the area they choose to dine at one of our top restaurants. It’s a multi-year plan, but it’s the best we have.
But in the meantime, I chose to stage my own little boycott of the proceedings. But I must admit, I missed my annual trip to New York. So much so that I’ve scheduled a flight to the city this weekend.
I’ll try to dine at the restaurant of next year’s Outstanding Chef winner.
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