Latest news with #JamesBeardMediaAwards
San Francisco Chronicle
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
These Bay Area writers (including me!) won James Beard Awards
This past weekend I was in Chicago for the James Beard Media Awards, our industry's annual celebration of the best food journalism, cookbooks and food TV. (They're the sister awards to the James Beard Restaurant and Chef Awards, which were announced last night.) There were no musical numbers or red carpet interviews. But there were celebrities, and I am of course speaking about baking legend and author of 'The Cake Bible' Rose Levy Beranbaum, who pioneered the reverse creaming method and the use of weight measurements for baking in the United States. Also, Padma Lakshmi. And I won a James Beard Award! I walked away with a medal for Emerging Voice in Journalism, which makes me feel like the very hungry caterpillar hatching from her cocoon after consuming one pickle, one lollipop, one slice of Swiss cheese, one slice of chocolate cake and other sundries, an accurate representation of my average Saturday. It's such an honor, and I'm grateful to my colleagues and editors for their support throughout my first year on the job. One of the highlights of Saturday night was seeing so many familiar faces from the Bay Area, many of whom walked away winners. Today's newsletter is dedicated to them and their award-winning work; I hope you'll take a moment to read and listen to these exemplary local voices. San Francisco resident and Chronicle contributor George McCalman won the MFK Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, together with his co-author Jeff Gordinier, for a beautiful feature in Food & Wine about the history of rice in Charleston. McCalman was recognized for his writing, but his trademark illustrations are remarkable as well. In the Audio Programming category, Sebastopol-based chef Preeti Mistry — the force behind the East Bay's Juhu Beach Club and Navi Kitchen, both now closed — won for an episode of their podcast, ' Loading Dock Talks with Preeti Mistry ' featuring New York chef Telly Justice. Mistry frequently interviews Bay Area chefs like Fernay McPherson and Tu David Phu, so it's appointment listening for diners in our region. The Professional and Restaurant category in the book awards honors a work by 'a culinary professional or restaurant chef' — think your favorite restaurant's cookbook rather than a book by a recipe developer or influencer. This year's winner was ' Convivir: Modern Mexican Cuisine in California's Wine Country,' the first cookbook from Rogelio Garcia, the chef at Auro in Napa Valley. Co-written with Andréa Lawson Gray of San Francisco, the book celebrates the intertwining of Garcia's Mexican heritage with the ingredients of Wine Country. And one Bay Area-adjacent mention: Laila El-Haddad is a D.C. area-based author and activist, but her plus-one to the awards was our own Reem Assil of Top 100 restaurant Reem's. I think that makes her honorary, right? El-Haddad won in the Personal Essay With Recipes category for her Saveur piece ' A Cuisine Under Siege.' It's hard to find the right words to describe this powerful essay, an elegy for El-Haddad's aunt who was killed in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza City in 2023. Cook her recipe for sumagiyya, a lamb stew with sumac, and give it a read.
Hindustan Times
17-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Hindustan Times
2025 James Beard Media Awards: Full list of winners revealed
The 35th outing for the James Beard Media Awards took place in Chicago on Saturday (June 14). The annual celebration is meant to honor 'excellence in books, broadcast media, and journalism covering food or drink-related content', according to the official website. The event was hosted by the Illinois Restaurant Association and Choose Chicago. Sift: The Elements of Great Baking Nicola Lamb (Clarkson Potter) The Bartender's Pantry: A Beverage Handbook for the Universal Bar Emma Janzen, Jim Meehan, and Bart Sasso (Ten Speed Press) Sake: The Art and Craft of Japan's National Drink Yoshiko Ueno-Müller (Prestel) Richard Hart Bread: Intuitive Sourdough Baking Richard Hart, Henrietta Lovell, and Laurie Woolever (Clarkson Potter) Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch Andrea Freeman (Metropolitan Books) Pass the Plate: 100 Delicious, Highly Shareable, Everyday Recipes: A Cookbook Carolina Gelen (Clarkson Potter) The Balkan Kitchen: Recipes and Stories from the Heart of the Balkans Irina Janakievska (Quadrille) Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves Nicola Twilley (Penguin Press) Convivir: Modern Mexican Cuisine in California's Wine Country Rogelio Garcia and Andréa Lawson Gray (Abrams) McAtlas: A Global Guide to the Golden Arches Gary He (Self-published) Jang: The Soul of Korean Cooking (More than 60 Recipes Featuring Gochujang, Doenjang, and Ganjang) Nadia Cho, Mingoo Kang, and Joshua David Stein (Artisan) Our South: Black Food Through My Lens Ashleigh Shanti (Union Square & Co.) Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking: Vegan Recipes, Tips, and Techniques Joe Yonan (Ten Speed Press) McAtlas: A Global Guide to the Golden Arches Gary He (Self-published) Paola Velez Bodega Bakes: Recipes for Sweets and Treats Inspired by My Corner Store (Union Square & Co.) Rose Levy Beranbaum Audio Programming Loading Dock Talks with Chef Preeti Mistry 'Cream Pie with Telly Justice' Airs on: Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast platforms Post Reports 'Bacon: The Best-Kept Secret in Washington' Airs on: Post Reports La Mera Mera Tamalera Airs on: YouTube MARCELLA Airs on: PBS American Masters World Eats Bread Airs on: National Geographic Channel G.O.A.T. Airs on: MasterClass Relish Airs on: PBS, Passport, TPT, TPT-2 and YouTube Little Fat Boy Airs on: Instagram, TikTok, Substack and YouTube Drink: A Look Inside the Glass Airs on: Apple TV, Prime Video, Tubi, and Roku Mohammed Shaqura Hamada Shoo Airs on: Instagram and TikTok Martha Stewart Beverage 'Want to Make Spirits in Thailand? Good Luck.' Craig Sauers Punch 'The farm bill hall of shame'; 'The essential workers missing from the farm bill'; 'Tribal nations want more control over their food supply' Teresa Cotsirilos, Bridget Huber, and Claire Kelloway Food & Environment Reporting Network and Mother Jones 'New tasting menu dinners at Honeysuckle Provisions are provocative and delicious'; 'The enduring, confusing, and always delicious Octopus Cart is still puffing along after 34 years'; 'Loch Bar, a new high-end seafood spot on Broad, swings big and misses' Craig LaBan Philadelphia Inquirer 'Gastro Obscura's Feast' Anne Ewbank, Diana Hubbell, and Sam O'Brien Gastro Obscura 'We Need to Talk About Trader Joe's' Adam Reiner TASTE The Bitter Southerner 'As Detroit sees a future in urban agriculture, some pushback harkens to a dark past' Lyndsay C. Green Detroit Free Press 'Florida Banned Farmworker Heat Protections. A Groundbreaking Partnership Offers a Solution.' Grey Moran Civil Eats 'The Art and Science of Kimchi' Andrea Geary Cook's Illustrated 'The North Koreans behind global seafood'; 'The Whistleblower' Ian Urbina and the Staff of The Outlaw Ocean Project The Outlaw Ocean Project and The New Yorker 'Etta's Five Bankruptcies Have Left a Collective Mess'; 'White Sox Fans Came for the Losses, Stayed for the Milkshakes'; 'Namasteak, USA' Ashok Selvam Eater Chicago 'The City that Rice Built' Jeff Gordinier and George McCalman Food & Wine 'The Only Constant is Chuck's' Rory Doyle Self-published "My Family's Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza' Mosab Abu Toha The New Yorker 'A Cuisine Under Siege' Laila El-Haddad SAVEUR 'Padma Lakshmi Walks Into a Bar' Helen Rosner The New Yorker MacKenzie Chung Fegan San Francisco Chronicle
Los Angeles Times
10-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Top Chef's' Kristen Kish doesn't hesitate to talk about kitchen sexism in her new memoir
Here's Looking at You's Lien Ta talks about the death of chef Jonathan Whitener, chef Jonathan Gil talks about running a restaurant with Stage IV cancer, and the chef trying to get as many Angelenos as possible to try Sri Lankan food. Also, our nominees for the James Beard Media Awards. I'm Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week's Tasting Notes. Nearly every female chef I've met hates to talk about being a female chef. Just, chef, please. It's a stance that Dominique Crenn asserted when she won the World's 50 Best Restaurants' award for 'world's best female chef' in 2016. 'She famously called it 'stupid,'' Heather Platt wrote last year in this paper of Crenn's feelings about her award. ''A chef is a chef.'' Even with the stories of yelling, groping and much worse behavior emerging since the #MeToo reckoning, the knowledge that the stresses of the industry also take a toll on men has conditioned some of us to believe that while women may not have an easy time in the business, they can still advance in the industry if they are tough enough. Here in Los Angeles, after all, it's not hard to name female chefs who lead their own restaurants, including Socalo's Susan Feniger and Mary Sue Milliken, n/naka's Niki Nakayama and Carole Iida-Nakayama, A.O.C.'s Suzanne Goin, Mozza's Nancy Silverton, Playa Provision's Brooke Williamson, Jar's Suzanne Tract, Kismet's Sara Kramer and Sarah Hymanson, Highly Likely's Kat Turner and many, many more than the handful of veterans who were making their way to the top during the 1970s, '80s and '90s. Indeed, some of the war stories we've frequently heard about women in restaurant kitchens have a quaint quality. In 1983, Ruth Reichl wrote a feature story for California magazine that began with the story of Milliken's first attempt (ultimately successful) to work at Chicago's Le Perroquet. 'Jovan Trboyevic, the owner, said he would never hire a pretty girl like me — it would cause chaos in the kitchen,' Milliken told Reichl. 'He offered me a job as a hat check girl instead.' By the time current 'Top Chef' host Kristen Kish was establishing herself in Chicago and Boston restaurants, 'hat check girl' was a job associated with black-and-white movies, not actual restaurant work. So I took notice when Kish, in her new memoir 'Accidentally On Purpose,' devoted the better part of a chapter to the disrespect she received in a male-dominated kitchen after she won Season 10 of 'Top Chef' in 2013. It was so bad that less than a year after attaining what she'd thought of as her dream job — chef de cuisine at a fine-dining destination restaurant, Boston's now-closed Menton — she quit. We're talking about a chef who proved to be the epitome of calm and unflappability in the midst of reality TV drama during her season as a 'Top Chef' contestant and the ultimate team player when she declined to blame a fellow contestant for the dish that led to Kish being eliminated from the competition. (Kish worked her way back into the game she ultimately won thanks to her cooking on 'Last Chance Kitchen.') She's also rappelled down a waterfall to harvest watercress in Panama for the National Geographic series 'Restaurants at the End of the World.' The irony is that Menton, Boston's first Relais & Châteaux restaurant, was a woman-owned restaurant. It was one of several businesses overseen by the hospitality company founded by Barbara Lynch, who was forced to close all of her restaurants last year because of a number of factors, including the fallout from a 2023 investigation of workplace abuse by New York Times reporter Julia Moskin. In her book, Kish does not question any of the accounts of employees who shared their stories with Moskin and others in the press about their boss (the incidents detailed appear to have happened after Kish left the company in 2014). Still, she views Lynch as a supportive mentor who gave her credit for dishes she created and was the one to suggest her as a contestant to 'Top Chef's' producers. Instead, Kish blames her issues in Menton's kitchen on the ungenerous attitudes of her male colleagues (while emphasizing that she has 'worked with many wonderful men over the years') and on a corporate decision to give her the top job at Menton without the power to make menu changes and subjecting her to a 'training period.' 'Barbara, along with the company's director of operations and its wine director — both of whom were women — were pulling for me to have the job' after 'Top Chef,' she wrote in the book. 'But there were also two men in the upper echelon of the organization who were not in agreement and didn't buy that I was ready for it.' The experience was the opposite of what Kish had experienced at another of Lynch's restaurants, the 10-seat Stir, where the menu changed nightly with the seasons and the chefs cooked as they talked and joked with customers across the counter — great training for her 'Top Chef' run. Yet at Menton, without the full support of the company, 'the team, mostly men,' Kish writes, felt free to be 'recalcitrant at best and more often perniciously undermining. ... Sometimes I was disregarded or ignored. ... Later, on my rare days off or when I was traveling ... they were changing dishes without my knowledge. ... It was a sort of psychological warfare for which I wasn't prepared. Not a single cell in my body wanted to engage in this kind of ... conflict.' Among the untrue rumors she heard about herself was that the only reason she had the Menton job was because she was having an affair with Lynch. 'I don't know if one of the male chefs from the company would have walked back into something like that,' Kish told me onstage when I interviewed her and 'Top Chef' head judge Tom Colicchio at last month's L.A. Times Festival of Books. 'They probably would have been praised and celebrated. There were people who wanted my position and my job. And I don't think [many] at the top echelon of the restaurant actually thought I was going to do well.' Then there was the time she and Lynch went to a gathering in London for Relais & Châteaux restaurants and encountered a male chef who bluntly told Kish, 'You're too pretty to be a chef.' Suddenly, the gulf between Kish and Milliken decades earlier wasn't so vast. Kish writes that Lynch instantly scolded the male chef for his insult: 'She told him in no uncertain terms to get ... out of there and leave us alone. And while I felt protected, it also made me sad. It was very clear that this was something Barbara had probably been dealing with her whole career. There was almost a rote reaction that many women in many fields would likely recognize — one they needed to cultivate in order to survive and succeed. Always playing defense, working harder, stirring up responses to pull out when some entitled overbearing dude shows up, seeming to think he matters more.' Of course, Kish's story has a happy ending. Leaving Menton could have ended her career as a chef since she was getting so many offers to appear on television ('Iron Chef: Quest for an Iron Legend,' 'Fast Foodies' and 'Restaurants at the End of the World'), something she is very good at. But she now oversees the restaurant Arlo Grey by Kristen Kish in Austin, while balancing life with her wife, Bianca Dusic, and hosting duties on Bravo's 'Top Chef.' I'll have more to share from my conversation with Kish and Colicchio in next week's newsletter. Meanwhile, here's what else has been happening ... During a wide-ranging interview with Food's Stephanie Breijo, restaurateur Lien Ta, the founder of Here's Looking at You, shared how mentally exhausting the restaurant business can be after revealing this week that she is closing her Koreatown restaurant on June 13. Of course, the slow pandemic recovery and erratic business after the recent fires factored into her decision, but it was the sudden death last year of her co-founder, the chef Jonathan Whitener, that weighed most on Ta. 'Eating his food,' Ta told Breijo, 'lifted my soul. ... The truth is that I created this restaurant with Jonathan, and he's eternally my collaborator. The remaining team are all in agreement that we want this to remain Jonathan's restaurant. We are missing our leader. Signing on for another five-year lease doesn't make sense when your leader is gone.' Ta also talked about the 'horrible dread' she felt at times 'wondering if anyone was going to book a reservation or come in at all, and who we were going to cut [from service].' 'I was definitely buried in a lot of grief,' she added. 'Sometimes I wasn't really sure what to focus on this last year, to be honest … a lot of restaurant owners are sort of programmed to always find solutions, to get through the day or the week or whatever your metric is. I've been doing that for a long time.' Breijo also had an intense conversation with chef Joshua Gil, who has Stage IV cancer and is in a contract dispute with his his former Mírame and Mírate business partner, but still recently was able to transform a strip-mall Mongolian barbecue restaurant into a Baja-style seafood spot called Three Flames with 'tacos, burgers, loaded fries and some of the city's most creative new tostadas and specials' while keeping the Mongolian barbecue. 'I'm a very stubborn a—,' Gil told Breijo. 'I like telling people, 'I'm Mexican. I don't know how to give up.'' One concession to his illness is that he is leaning hard on Anthony Rodriguez, who worked with Gil at Mírame and Mírate. 'These days he sees Rodriguez as the chef,' Breijo wrote, 'and himself as a cook who sometimes creates recipes.' 'I've been sitting with our identities: who we are, our images of who we are,' Gil said. 'I haven't donned the [chef's] whites in a long time, and yet I'm still referred to as 'chef.' We never lose that. It doesn't matter how away from the kitchen you are. You're constantly being called 'chef' by those that know you as such, and it's [hard] holding on to that livelihood, that lifestyle.' Nominations for the James Beard Media Awards, covering books, broadcast media and journalism, were announced on Wednesday. Among the many excellent cookbooks and broadcast, video and audio shows nominated is 'The SalviSoul Cookbook: Salvadoran Recipes and the Women Who Preserve Them' by L.A.'s Karla Tatiana Vasquez. As former Food reporter Cindy Carcamo wrote in her profile of Vasquez last year, 'SalviSoul' is 'the first-ever Salvadoran cookbook to appear on a Big Five imprint.' Food editor Daniel Hernandez talked with Vasquez after news of the nomination came out for our Cooking newsletter, which will publish tomorrow. (Subscribe for free here.) We also received the happy news that three of our own Food journalists are nominated for Beard awards. Restaurant critic Bill Addison is nominated in the dining and travel category for his recent guide to dining in San Francisco. Food's senior editor Danielle Dorsey is nominated in the home cooking category for her story 'The warmth of Black traditions around the Thanksgiving table.' And columnist Jenn Harris is up for the Craig Claiborne Distinguished Criticism Award. Her nominated stories are reviews of Sophy's Cambodian restaurant in Long Beach and Star Leaf in Pasadena, plus a column on why chili crisp and chili crunch are terms that should not be trademarked. The winners will be announced at a ceremony in Chicago on June 14.
