Food & Drink 2019: Beard Science

Make Barbecue a National Award

Steve: So, this year's Beard Award nominees were announced last month. Let’s start with a big change we recommend, at least for those of us here in the South. Chris, you pitched this to me, and it’s such a great idea I’m stunned no one has tried to implement it already: Barbecue should be a national award, instead of putting those chefs in with each region.

Chris: First of all, I’m a barbecue guy, and I appreciate the time, effort and art involved in converting a tough, whole animal into delicious, tender smoked meat. 2018 James Beard Award winner for Best Chef: Southeast Rodney Scott is a good friend of mine, and I love his brand of South Carolina whole-hog barbecue. But selecting him as the winner for his work in his Charleston restaurant, which had only been open a year, is problematic to me. It’s certainly not his fault, but how can you compare the food at a restaurant that essentially serves seven dishes plus sides to a place like Katie Button’s Cúrate in Asheville, N.C., where the chef creates dozens of whimsical innovative Spanish tapas presented artistically to diners who might order as many as five dishes at a time?

Steve: One-hundred percent agreed. These are not apples-to-apples comparisons. I think the industry and critics are savvy enough to realize that there is real talent and effort that goes into producing great barbecue in all styles. But in the New York region this year, you’ve got Billy Durney from Hometown Bar-B-Que and Sean Gray from Momofuku Ko on the same chef list. I’ve been to both, and they’re spectacular. But a $195 tasting menu at Ko (and the service they provide) should not be up against somewhere that sells meat by the half-pound. It’s a disservice to both of them. Besides, if there are pitmasters in so many different parts of the country doing great work, it warrants recognition as a national category.

Chris: Carey Bringle of Nashville’s Peg Leg Porker is a vocal proponent — he’s careful to say that this is just his opinion — of spinning out a pitmaster award to the national level, just like the way bakers and pastry chefs are recognized separately from savory chefs. He says: “Pitmasters and chefs are different. Neither is less or more, just different. While some pitmasters are classically trained chefs, most are not. In my opinion, there should be a different category for pitmasters if the committee is going to keep nominating them.”

Minimize the role of PR campaigns

Chris: Philip Krajeck of Rolf and Daughters was nominated for a Beard four times before he turned 35 for his work at Fish Out of Water at the WaterColor Inn & Resort in Santa Rosa Beach, Fla. Since moving to Nashville and opening Rolf in 2012, he hadn’t been nominated for a single Beard Award until this year, when his new venture Folk got a nod in the national Best New Restaurant category. Did Krajeck somehow become a worse chef after leaving Florida? I think not, and Andrew Knowlton of Bon Appetit would concur. “Krajeck was put on earth to make pasta,” he said in a piece naming Rolf and Daughters one of the best new restaurants in America in 2013.

Steve: What’s the difference between here and Florida then (he said, lobbing a softball)?

Chris: Working as part of a swanky 30A resort, Krajeck was probably backed by a PR team that saw Beard recognitions translating into destination dining dollars. In Nashville, Krajeck notably eschews organized public-relations efforts, preferring to concentrate on the plate. I have nothing but admiration for him in that and many other ways.

Redraw the Regions

Steve: Can we talk about the regions for a second? This is my biggest peeve. There should be about 15 of these regions instead of the current 10 in order to make it manageable for voters. Our region, called the Southeast, runs from the Mississippi River to the Atlantic Ocean with at least three major dining-destination cities in it.  

Chris: Does anybody at the James Beard House have access to a damned globe? How can the South region contain Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, then somehow skip right over Georgia to include Florida? That’s some Tammany Hall gerrymandering shit right there. 

Steve: There are two quick fixes that should happen no matter what: Chicago and L.A. should be their own regions, just as New York is now. There’s too much quantity and diversity in those cities for them to be a fair comparison. If you’re in Ohio, Michigan or Indiana, your chefs/restaurants rarely, if ever, make the short list. Similarly, having Las Vegas, San Francisco and L.A. in the same region is just too much. 

Chris: Good luck to a Pacific-region voter who has to cover all of California and Hawaii! Steve, do you reckon the Scene would pony up a travel budget for me to check out ULU Ocean Grill in Kona? Actually, the distance from L.A. to Honolulu is shorter than the trip from Wyoming to Alaska, both states within the Northwest region. (And I imagine there are far fewer flights between those two points as well.)

Steve: Woe to the Midwest voter, who has to cover Kansas, Iowa, Missouri, Nebraska, both Dakotas, Minnesota and Wisconsin. There’s no way Kansas City voters are getting up to Milwaukee (underrated scene), over to Minneapolis and back to St. Louis. It’s too much. 

Change Best New Restaurant to a Regional Award

Chris: Even though the idea of actually visiting a decent proportion of the Outstanding Restaurant nominees from across the nation would be daunting, at least a voter wouldn’t necessarily have to do them all in a year. That’s how a spot like Frank and Pardis Stitt’s fantastic Highlands Bar & Grill in Birmingham, Ala., finally won after being nominated for 10 years, like some sort of culinary Susan Lucci. Eventually, enough Beard selectors probably made it down there to experience the Stittses’ special brand of hospitality, finally recognizing it was absolutely worthy of acclaim.

Steve: Which brings us to the problem of Best New Restaurant, where the voters get less than a year. The result? The award skews heavily toward New York or a few other destinations that attract a lot of Beard voters, like New Orleans. Now, Henrietta Red’s Julia Sullivan — who won last year’s Scene Iron Fork competition, as it happens — is nominated for Best Chef: Southeast. But with Best New Restaurant skewing toward the coasts and New Orleans, that means a place like Henrietta Red here in Nashville never really had a chance, much less someplace like J.C. Holdway — which is run by an actual Beard Award winner, Joseph Lenn — because Beard voters are never going to a culinary backwater like Knoxville.

Chris: Worse, this logistical problem means voters are more likely to vote only for places they’ve heard of from other endorsements, without actually visiting, strictly a no-no under voting regulations — which require voters to certify that they’ve actually eaten the food at a restaurant they vote for. If you limited Best New Restaurant voting to within a region, that could allow Beard committee members the chance to actually get around to a greater percentage of the nominees between the announcement of the long list and the final voting.

Steve: Exactly. Remember that PR issue we were talking about? Something like Best New Restaurant automatically gives the advantage to places that can leverage good PR through national lists like Food & Wine’s best new chef or Bon Appetit’s or GQ’s best new restaurants. It’s essentially farming an award out to other people’s opinions.

Eliminate Voting Outside of Regions

Chris: If limiting Best New Restaurant voting to within a region flies as an idea, why not extend that policy to all the categories? 

Steve: ATTICA! ATTICA! ATTICA!

Chris: I can’t imagine that many working chefs, journalists and other electors really have the time or budget to experience the food at the 20 restaurants nominated in just the Southeast region, much less all the other regions or the outstanding chef/new chef/new restaurant/wine program/pastry/baker/candlestick maker categories. 

Steve: Look, I know we’re in the weeds on this stuff, but it’s only because we want the Beards to get it right. They’re fond of calling it “the Oscars of dining,” so maybe the Beard House should take a cue from the Oscars and make some substantial changes.

Chris: Since there’s a necessity under the rules to vote for the places you’ve been to, that encourages serious proximity bias. Instead, encourage voters to concentrate only on their home region, and if you want to deputize some national “superdelegates” that travel the country and can speak intelligently on multiple regions, I’d be good with that. Just don’t tell Bernie Sanders.