Thomas Bille of Belly and the Beast Takes Home James Beard Award for Best Chef: Texas
On June 16, the winners of the 'Oscars of food,' as the James Beard Awards have been called, were announced. From Houston, the sole winner is Thomas Bille at Belly of the Beast in the Best Chef: Texas category.
Bille tells deeply personal stories through his cooking, unraveling his family history and formative years living in Los Angeles. The restaurant began as a pop-up in 2018 and later opened as a counter-service restaurant in Old Town Spring in February 2020. COVID impacted the nation the following month, and in 2021 Bille was forced to close Belly of the Beast after a dispute over increased rent with the landlord. It reopened at its current location in 2023. The menu at Belly of the Beast combines his Mexican American heritage, French culinary training, and family memories into dishes that are personal, playful, and genre-defying. Previously, Belly of the Beast earned a Bib Gourmond at the first-ever Texas Michelin Awards ceremony.
The 2025 nominees for Houston included Ema for Best New Restaurant; March for Outstanding Wine and Other Beverages Program; and Emmanuel Chavez at Tatemó in the Best Chef: Texas category.
Each year, the James Beard Foundation recognizes restaurants, bars, and hospitality professionals in categories such as Outstanding Restaurant, Best Chef, and Best New Chef. The first James Beard Awards ceremony was held in 1991, when chefs such as Rick Bayless, Nancy Silverton, and Wolfgang Puck emerged as winners. In recent years, the awards have been under increased scrutiny following the cancellation of its programming in 2020 and 2021 due to allegations of misbehavior and abuse against nominated chefs, as well as a lack of nominated and winning Black chefs in the categories. In response, the James Beard Foundation conducted an internal audit to make its voting processes more inclusive and equitable, with plans to return in 2022. In recent years, the awards have shifted the Best Chef category to a regional model to better recognize the diversity and depth of talent.
Disclosure: Some Vox Media staff members are part of the voting body for the James Beard Foundation Awards. See More:
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
22 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Woodkid Says Hideo Kojima Changed ‘Death Stranding 2' Because It Wasn't ‘Polarizing'
Over the course of his more than 20-year career, Woodkid (real name Yoann Lemoine) has worked in just about every medium. The French singer-songwriter started his career in as a CGI artist in video games before becoming a prolific music video director, helming videos like Katy Perry's 'Teenage Dream,' Taylor Swift's 'Back to December,' and Harry Styles' 'Sign of the Times.' In 2011, he shifted yet again with the release of his own EP, titled Iron EP. Since then, he's continued down the path as a musician, releasing two more albums (2013's The Golden Age and 2020's S16) and the song 'Prologue' for the Paris 2024 Olympics, has never strayed too far from the gaming world — he counts himself as a fan of this year's breakout hits Blue Prince and (France's own) Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, to name a few. Now, he's returning to an active role in game creation as co-composer of PlayStation's Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (out June 26). More from Rolling Stone 10 Years of 'Critical Role': 'We Are Never Going Away' With the Release of the Switch 2, the Original Nintendo Switch Is Marked Down Online An Ode to the Nintendo DS Over the course of three years, Woodkid worked directly with Death Stranding creator and gaming visionary Hideo Kojima to produce hundreds of hours of music, a curated version of which now comprises the game's official soundtrack, Woodkid for Death Stranding 2: On the Beach (out today). Unlike most video game music, Woodkid's tracks aren't just ambience, but fully vocalized songs with lyrics. The other twist is that each of the tracks has been designed to change dynamically based on the player's actions in-game, fluidly looping, extending, and contorting to run shorter or longer depending on how the game is interacted with, all without ever cutting lyrics or losing the narrative cohesion with the overall story. It's heady stuff, and extremely complicated from a technical perspective — which is fitting, given that Death Stranding itself and the work of Kojima (who previously created the Metal Gear Solid series) are often seen as highly experimental and philosophically obtuse. For Woodkid, it's a dream project; working with a collaborator like Kojima affords him the opportunity to create something that's artistically satisfying while also near guaranteed to be a mainstream success. For Kojima, having Woodkid on board means his creative vision can be brought to life sonically by someone who truly gets it. They better, there's no room for compromise ('You have no idea how much he doesn't give a shit,' Woodkid says.) Ahead of the game's recent live premiere event in Los Angeles, Rolling Stone met with Woodkid to discuss the complex process of reverse engineering his own music, the state of video games in popular culture, and how he bonded with Kojima over their shared 'fetishes.' This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. How did you get involved with ? Did Hideo Kojima seek you out?We met before the pandemic, and he used some of my songs in the first episode [Death Stranding], but it was songs from my previous records. He used 'Goliath' and 'Pale Yellow' in the gameplay. He contacted me just after, when he was working on the sequel, and he asked me to write a song for the new game. I was like, 'Yes, but I'm done with the whole email music and Covid, so if we work, we work together.' So, I went to Tokyo where I met with the teams and I worked in the building at Kojima Productions. And I wrote the first song, but because I wanted to give some options to Hideo, I wrote a couple songs, and then at the end of the day, [he] was like, 'Oh yeah, this I'm gonna use, and this one I'm gonna use, [this] gives me an idea.' But then I give him options, and then the options are becoming two different cut scenes. And then, what was one song ended up being like 20 hours of music. It's just a very fun experience of being sucked into Hideo's universe and just writing for it based on the actor's performance, the storyline, some scenes that he would show me, some gameplay moments. It started simple and it ended up a very, very complicated adventure How deeply involved was Kojima in the day-to-day production?It has always been very organic, in a way. It was more like I was feeding him elements. I've been working on procedural music, so music that can evolve all the time. That is difficult because they're pop songs, so they're sung. So, there was a whole level of procedurality that we had to create in the music based on the evolution of chord progression, the different layers of music. Every song that I was giving him was just a pop song, but it was also like 100 alternatives of that song that then the programmers could work with and exchange back and forth with us, so we would fine tune things. I think the fact that he had material that was shapeable allowed him to evolve with my work without it being constraining on my side. It was almost like planting seeds, and then he would grow the garden. How do you even write music that changes in real time while playing? Well, the main challenge is that when you sing a song with lyrics, there is, of course, another level — which is the narrative. And you kind of have to make it work with the storyline and whatever the action [that's] happening. And if you want a song to start at a certain point, but end at a certain point — and it can be two minutes for a player, but it can be 20 minutes for another player — you have to be able ton fill in the gaps between the words, between the meaning of the words and depending on what the player does. It's been a whole adventure of programming our own samplers and sequencers that would recreate code sequences based on musical theory so that the processors could rebuild the evolution of the harmonic progressions based on the actions of the player, but with it sounding very organic and not [like] it was computer-made. It was very interesting to create; it's almost like you have to extract the essence of what a song is on its purely theoretical, mathematic approach, and then you have to let the machine rebuild. It's almost like making a song, reverse engineering it, and then letting the machine rebuild it. It's like a four-minute song that becomes a 30-minute song. Have you wanted to create music like this before?It's very, very, very geeky, and something I've always been interested in conceptually — to create music that was ever-evolving, and that wasn't fixed and wasn't condemned to one version. Which is what you do when you do a first studio album; when you do a studio album, you kind of trap these songs, and it's often the first encounters you have with that song as an artist. Afterwards, you go on stage and you get to play them and make them change and evolve over time. Is what's on the soundtrack the original recordings or versions informed by the game's development?All the base stuff was made in Tokyo with Hideo, and I think it defined 90 percent of what's on the record now. But then I worked with people like Elle Fanning, [who] came in the process. I had already sung with her in the past; I've known her for 15 years now. She's a good friend, and she sung a version of 'To to Wilder' on the record. Describe the title track, 'To the Wilder.'I knew I wanted to make a song that was a celebration of the people who understood the game, the people who understood the statement of the [first] game. You know, the fact that the game was called a walking simulator and all this, I thought it was fun to reference that because I believe that it's the exact same [people] that love spending hours on their horse in Red Dead Redemption II just wandering around. I find that very ironic. I think that there is so much control in the work of Hideo; he knows exactly what he's doing. It's not random. And I think that the celebration was something that he really connected with, and the song, because that was exactly his intention. It was to celebrate the people that are wild and the people that love games that are different. How did Elle Fanning get involved with the alternate version that's on the soundtrack?When we started working on the song with Hideo, he's like,' Should we have her sing it?' It was like, 'Yes, I was dreaming for you to ask for it.' So, we met a year ago in Los Angeles, and we recorded the song. It was just, finally, I left like the song was coming alive, because it was just, suddenly, another voice was saying my words, and it felt like it was kind of validating the emotions that I had put in that song, especially when it comes from such a wonderful actress and talented person and singer like Elle. It has a complete other meaning. The lyrics can be heard as one person talking to one person, and that gives the idea of someone breaking up with someone. But when two people sing it and share these lyrics and sing it to each other, it's more about incompatibility with love and the way two people are too wild to live with each other, and this gives a total other dimension to the song. It becomes dialogue. The soundtrack has an eclectic mix of tones, from industrial to Americana. How did you reconcile those different sonic footprints?There are a lot of sides and approaches to my music over time, because I've composed a lot for stage, for my own records, for intimates and writings, but I've also worked a lot with images and cinema and video games. And I thought that [this] was the perfect project to reconcile this very bipolar kind of tonalities that are in me. [I also] think the work of Hideo is very bipolar. There's a political violence to it, but there's also a very sensitive human tenderness to it. And I thought it would be really interesting that the soundtrack would be a real reflection of that natural versus industrial and mechanical kind of texture that's there in the game. I think [there are] moments of the game that called for narrative and human emotion, where I sing, where I'm in a very sensitive territory with folk and Americana kind of ballads. I also wanted extreme I also wanted extreme German industrial record kind of violence, because I think the violence of the machines in that game really called for that. And it's something that I would have never done on a personal record because I don't know how I would have reconciled this inside the same record. For some reason, it makes a lot of sense in the world of Death Stranding. What appeals to you about the world of ?First of all, it's not geeky. Which is very important for me because I'm, more and more, looking for games that are not referencing themselves or that are self-digesting their own culture over and over again. I'm just so tired of seeing the same RPG, steampunky kind of worlds and I need to breathe fresh air. And I have this with the world of Kojima. I think he's so inspired by cinema and contemporary art and other forms of art. And I love the approach he has to nature, which is something that is very touching. Somehow, the way he celebrates nature in the games — he lets you watch and embrace nature. Do you think Kojima approaches sci-fi differently than other people?I like his approach [to] the future, which is not necessarily like a very Black Mirror kind of one-sided vision of technology in the future. It's always ambivalent. It's not like, 'Oh, AI is bad. AI is going to eat us all.' It has more depth to it, more intelligence, or more political intelligence in the way he approaches the themes. And I love that the first installment was about the idea of connection through technology. And the second one differs a little bit from that; the second one is a take on the first one, which I think is a very interesting narrative. How do you view your relationship with Kojima?I mean, we're friends. It's just a very intimate connection that we have. I think we have a lot in common, visually. A lot of fetishes that are common. I knew a lot about his work because I played Metal Gear Solid when I was a child, or a teenager. It was such a shock for me, visual shock. I think the PlayStation culture and, especially, these games like Final Fantasy and the world of Hideo, really shaped my eye and my sensitivity for this kind of medium. At the end of the day, it sweats in my work — his work sweats in my work and, even if I don't want it or don't want intellectualize it, it's just part of what built me. There's just this kind of connection of fetishes and visuals that I think are very strong between us, and I really appreciate that we're not afraid of darkness, and the melancholy that comes with darkness and these very sci-fi themes. It's just something we really embrace together and we're not ashamed of. Is there something essential that you learned from him over the course of development?There's a key moment where we had a discussion, probably halfway [through] when we were doing the game, where he came to me and he said, 'We have a problem.' Then he said, 'I'm going to be very honest, we have been testing the game with players and the results are too good. They like it too much. That means something is wrong; we have to change something.' And he changed stuff in the script and the way some crucial stuff [happens] in the game because he thought his work was not polarizing and not triggering enough emotions. And he said, 'If everyone likes it, it means it's mainstream. It means it's conventional. It means it's already pre-digested for people to like it. And I don't want that. I want people to end up liking things they didn't like when they first encountered it, because that's where you really end up loving something. And that was really a lesson for me; not doing stuff to please people, but to make them shift a little bit and move them. It must be invigorating to work on something like this that's not a real anomaly in the work of Hideo and Death Stranding, which is [that] they're mainstream games, but are so radical. It's so hard to be mainstream and radical today, at the same time. To be mainstream, you kind of have to compromise with so much. You can make pieces of art that are halfway of everything, but Hideo? You have no idea how much he doesn't give a shit about this. He really doesn't. He doesn't compromise; he does what he wants. He knows what he's doing, and it's the traits of a genius. It doesn't mean that he doesn't listen, which is why I think he's a genius. [He's] shaping his world with the ideas of his teams. It's not just him bossing around everything. I've been feeding him; somehow, at some point shapeshifting and edit or something. But's always been a dialog. It's never been, 'I know exactly what I'm doing and no one else can interfere in the process. So, he's always been the exact opposite of this — having control by letting people in. People sometimes have the fake impression that Hideo is very egotistical, [but] he's someone that changes his mind very intelligently based on what people bring him. Do you think will inspire other developers?I think it will probably inspire people the way Metal Gear inspired so many people, the way his work has been inspiring to so many people. I already see a lot of Death Stranding in indie games, in the tonality and the ambition of the emotions. Some of these games try to mimic, but I think it's hard to copy Hideo. It's difficult, and it's very visible. It wouldn't be surprising seeing him being a very strong source of inspiration for film directors. I know the cinema world is really envious of his success and his vision and the radicality of his vision. Best of Rolling Stone Every Super Bowl Halftime Show, Ranked From Worst to Best The United States of Weed Gaming Levels Up
Eater
an hour ago
- Eater
Frenchette Team Is Opening a Restaurant Inside A24's West Village Theater
Historic New York City theater Cherry Lane Theatre is getting ready to reopen — now in the hands of film studio A24, behind recent films like the Materialists and Babygirl . The intent, according to news that first circulated in 2023 about the company purchasing the theater, was to turn it into a clubhouse of sorts for events, performances, as well as film screenings. A cool concession stand would make sense at any new theater, especially one with as savvy a marketing team as the one at A24. This year, A24 released its own line of chocolate bars — the synergy is already there. Community board filings show that the film studio is taking it a step further, working to open a lobby restaurant and bar. It appears to be in collaboration with Galactus Group LLC, affiliated with Riad Nasr and Lee Hanson, two of New York's biggest restaurateurs, known for Frenchette, Le Rock, and most recently, Le Veau D'Or. The latter in particular showcases their commitment to honoring a space's past, where they relaunched one of the oldest French bistros in New York. It wouldn't be the team's first time working in a cultural center, either: they also opened Frenchette Bakery inside the Whitney Museum. A source close to the restaurant confirmed that the project — a new hospitality concept — is underway and looking at a fall opening. A 2023 liquor authority application for the Cherry Lane Theatre listed the dining room seat count at around 60. The theater, located at 38 Commerce Street, has seemingly never had a restaurant, but the space dates back to 1923. It was once known for its counterculture, off-Broadway plays, and has hosted performances from playwrights to musicians and writers — such as Bob Dylan, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sam Shepard, and David Mamet — but it struggled in its later life. With in-person film attendance dwindling in recent years, others in the industry have made attempts to restore these sacred entertainment spaces. In 2023, Eater LA reported on director Quentin Tarantino's new cafe inside his Vista Theater. That same year, Netflix announced it had purchased the Paris Theater in Midtown. Most recently, HBO's John Wilson is opening Low Cinema in Ridgewood. Eater has reached out to Hanson and Nasr's team and A24, but did not hear back before publishing. See More: Coming Attractions NYC Restaurant Openings
New York Post
an hour ago
- New York Post
Kelly Ripa says Mark Consuelos' diet is ‘way too disciplined' — but it left her ‘super fit' when she tried it
Kelly Ripa says her husband, Mark Consuelos, is pretty tight. Too tight — but, then, so was her Oscars gown. 'So right before the Academy Awards, I was having trouble getting my dress zipped up the side. It was a side-zip dress, and I kept getting zipped into the dress,' Ripa, 54, confessed on a recent episode of 'Live with Kelly and Mark.' 3 Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos at the Oscars on Sunday, March 2, 2025. Disney via Getty Images Needing results fast, she turned to her hubby's super strict, super high protein diet for three days and — lo and behold — the zipper slid like a kid on a waterslide. 'I don't love it, but I ate exactly how you told me to eat, and that dress zipped right up, no side skin,' she told Consuelos, also 54. 'And I looked super fit. Super, super fit. So thank you for that.' That being said, she made it pretty clear his regimen wasn't her everyday jam. 'It's the only time I've listened to Mark about my diet because I typically don't like to do what you're doing,' she said. 'I just find, you're like, way too disciplined. I can't live that way. But for 72 hours, I can live like Mark Consuelos so I lived like Mark Consuelos for 72 hours.' 3 'I don't love it, but I ate exactly how you told me to eat, and that dress zipped right up, no side skin,' she said. ABC So, what did this miracle diet entail? According to Ripa, it was plenty of yogurt, veggies and steak — much to the talk show host's dismay, as she admitted that she's 'not big on animal protein.' Consuelos said the diet is 'the craze now,' possibly alluding to the popularity of the carnivore diet, which is being touted as a game changer for the gut by wellness influencers and celebs like Jenny McCarthy. However, it's worth noting that experts have expressed concerns about the potential health risks of this trendy meal plan, citing an increased risk of kidney stones, LDL cholesterol, heart disease, colon cancer, digestive issues and nutritional deficiencies as potential side effects. 3 'It's the only time I've listened to Mark about my diet because I typically don't like to do what you're doing,' she said. 2003 RAMEY PHOTO 310-828-3445/L 'There are significant long-term risks with following the carnivore diet,' Dr. Joseph Antoun, CEO of the longevity company L-Nutra, previously told The Post, arguing for a 'well-balanced, plant-forward approach' that is 'rich in complex carbs, plant-based/fish-based proteins and healthy fats from nuts and seeds' instead. Consuelos himself cautioned that it's crucial to increase your fiber intake when following a high-protein diet, especially if you're doing it as a lifestyle choice and not a 72-hour stint. 'It's really, really important. 'Recommended 25 grams of fiber per day for women, 38 grams for men.' So it's crucial for 'maintaining a healthy gut microbiome and may lower the rates of chronic disease such as diabetes,' he said. Of course, it helps to have a live-in expert, as it sounds like Ripa didn't even know what she was eating most of the time. 'You were there, you were managing my diet,' she told her husband on the episode. 'I'm like, 'I don't know, I ate whatever you told me to eat.' Literally, if he was like, 'Eat this,' I ate it. And it was great for the 72 hours I had to suffer through it. But they're talking about daily life every day, if you're having a high protein diet…' '…Make sure you take your fiber,' he said.
