The James Beard Awards are often called the Academy Awards of food. Just last weekend, while dining at one of this year’s Texas semifinalists, I heard an eager customer tell his friends, “They’re the Oscars of food!”
But there is one very big difference between the Beards and the Oscars: everyone can watch the same movies. Even if you don’t live near an arthouse theater, you can probably find Oscar nominees on a streaming service. More importantly, the Oscar voters all watch the same movies. They all have access to a free streaming service hosting the candidate movies. If an Oscar voter skips a Best Picture nominee, it’s by choice.
Restaurants are different. They’re fixed in place, and nobody can go to all of them. As a result, the James Beard Restaurant and Chef Awards are broken. The ability to judge a Beard category, like the kindest hospitality in America, rests on the obvious falsehood that each voter has experienced all the hospitality in America.
I’ve heard many chefs complain about the Beards over the years: that they’re political, a personality contest, or a woke conspiracy. The truth is simpler: judges vote for the places they’ve visited, and they haven’t visited everything. If large numbers of judges don’t visit your place, you lose.
Even the regional chef awards are impractical. Until 2020, Texas was lumped into a region that stretched out to Arizona. Last year, I visited all five finalists, and Awards paid for my meal receipts, but not for gas, mileage, or lodging. Three of them I was only able to visit once, not enough to see whether a restaurant’s excellence is consistent.
This year, any Texas judge wanting to compare the five contenders faces a tall order: road tripping to Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Seguin, and El Paso. (Disclosure: I helped judge the Texas awards in 2020 and 2022, but I am not involved this year.)
The Awards could solve their credibility crisis by paying for judges’ travel to every candidate business. But I don’t support that plan. If the James Beard Foundation has enough money to sponsor all that travel, they should find a wiser and more charitable way to spend the cash, like school lunches.
No, the solution is simple. If the Beards are plagued with problems—apple-and-orange dilemmas, burdensome travel, growing expenses, resentment from overlooked rural areas, judges who can’t complete their duties, popularity contests, or bias in favor of restaurants with long hours and plenty of available reservations—they all have one very easy answer. Let more restaurants win.
Here’s how the Awards currently work: all the voters help create a longlist of contenders, called “semifinalists.” The semifinalists are announced. Then, from that list, a shorter group of finalists is announced. Finally, the judges vote on the finalists in each category to determine a winner.
Here’s my proposal: call the semifinalists the “nominees.” Call the finalists the “winners.” That’s it. There’s no final round. Each category has five winners instead of one. Every year, there are five best bars, five best bakeries, five best chefs in Texas, and so on. Everybody wins. The Awards recognize more diversity, cover more territory, celebrate more excellence, cause less drama, and cost less money.
This plan is so obviously good that I can only think of three possible objections. One is that it would change the in-person awards show. Too bad, so sad. Another is that it’s un-American to have five people share the title of the nation’s best. America likes naming winners and losers. OK, but the Beards are a celebration, not a competition. They are not a reality show. Their intention should be to make every candidate feel honored.
Would an award’s value be diluted with more winners? I don’t think so. Frankly, the Beards’ value is already diluted. Having seen the process from the inside, I strongly believe that the semifinalist title is the highest compliment available, because it’s the closest to the local experts’ wishes, before those wishes are erased by the mysterious whims of the other voters.
The final possible objection is that I am proposing a special-snowflake participation trophy. But I don’t agree with that, either. The Texas Restaurant Association says that our state has more than 50,000 restaurants. Narrowing them all down to five—one percent of one percent—is a Herculean task already. Narrowing those five down to one is even harder, with both the logistics and the philosophical dilemmas involved. If judges can’t fairly assess every candidate against each other, letting them all win is more honest, more equitable, more just, and more transparent.
Look at this year’s five contenders: a Thai restaurant in Houston, a Seguin barbecue joint, a high-end Mexican kitchen in El Paso, a San Antonio spot with southern and Mediterranean flavors, and a Dallas bánh mì patio. How do you compare those? How do you choose a winner? I say, stop the process here.
When I visited last year’s five finalists, my dilemma was simple: I loved them all. I wanted them all to thrive. As a voter, I felt like my vote for one business equated to a slap down to another business. And I didn’t want to slap anybody. My vote was painful. This shouldn’t be about hurting or losing. It should be about honoring the best in our industry. And there is a lot of the best.
What do you do if you have a slate of incredible candidates for an honor, you want them all to benefit, and you’re not equipped to judge them properly?
Let them all win.
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