Beard noms, Nom takes, IRC knives, Anticipation lists, and more...
Family Meal - Friday, March 18th, 2022
Hello Friday,
Quick reminder that the Tuesday Family Meal that went out to paying subscribers only is copy / pasted below as usual. If you wish you were getting Tuesdays’ on Tuesdays too…
Went a bit long on the Beard noms (and reactions to them) today, but am very interested in your thoughts on or off the record too. Please reply to this if you’ve got takes!
Let’s get to it…
Beard Season – The nominees for the 2022 James Beard Awards (Restaurant & Chef editions) are out! Full list here.
And the nominees (in some sample categories) are…
Outstanding Restaurateur: Ashok Bajaj (DC); Chris Bianco (Phoenix); Kevin Gillespie (Atlanta); Akkapong "Earl" Ninsom (Portland, OR); Chris Williams (Houston); and Ellen Yin (Philadelphia).
Outstanding Chef : Reem Assil (Reem's, Bay Area); Mashama Bailey (The Grey, Savannah); Peter Chang (Peter Chang, VA/MD); Jason Vincent (Giant, Chicago); and Rachel Yang and Seif Chirchi (Joule, Seattle).
Outstanding Restaurant: Brennan's (New Orleans); Butcher & Bee (Charleston); Chai Pani (Asheville); Parachute (Chicago); and The Walrus and the Carpenter (Seattle).
Best New Restaurant: Angry Egret Dinette (Los Angeles); Bacanora (Phoenix); BARDA (Detroit); Dhamaka (NYC); Horn BBQ (Oakland); Kasama (Chicago); Leeward (Portland, ME); Owamni (Minneapolis); Oyster Oyster (DC); Roots Southern Table (Dallas); and Ursula (NYC).
Sample Twitter takes:
Keith Pandolfi in Cincinnati on regional dominance: “Dear, JBF. Please, please, please give Chicago its own category. Four out of five finalists for Best Chef Great Lakes is simply ridiculous.”
Devita Davison in Detroit on planting seeds: “Warda Bouguettaya being nominated for Outstanding Pastry Chef hits different! Six years ago she was awarded $700 by [Davison’s nonprofit FoodLab] to help get her bakery started out of a church kitchen.”
Eater LA (via Mona Holmes) with a sigh: “Welp: There are only four James Beard Award finalists for Los Angeles this year.”
And SF’s Pim Techamuanvivit with some Thai pride: “What a day to be Thai chefs/restaurateurs in the US! Four of us are finalists in the Beard Awards. Congratulations ยินดีด้วยค่ะ! I’ve always believed that a cuisine is properly recognized when there’s not just one chef or one restaurant that is the one face of us.”
Takes elsewhere seem mostly positive or mild, but I read Houston Chronicle critic Alison Cook’s piece and winced a bit to see diversity and a decline in quality lumped together in the same paragraph like this:
“Steve McHugh — and I can’t believe I lived long enough to write this — is the token White male chef up for the Best Chef Texas title. I’m teasing, but only a little. The JBF reforms in the voting and nominating processes have indeed produced a wildly diverse slate of finalists. I did notice, glancing over the long semifinalist slate, that it seems less tied to consistent culinary excellence than it once was. My eyebrow shot up a few times. Good works and community outreach factor in now, too. If a deemphasis on consistent, soaring quality is the price of disrupting an awards system that was too tilted towards a culinary in-crowd, then so be it.”
The full piece is behind a paywall, and in it Cook does celebrate a lot of the new list, and says she fought in the past for people outside the “culinary in-crowd.” And she caveats any complaints with a disclaimer that she resigned from the awards committees twice!
But… I still winced. Flirting with “forced diversity drops quality,” requires some big caveats — not least: did anything else drop quality before…? — preferably in the immediate vicinity of the flirting.
Beard Season Too – Also announced were the Beards’ 2022 Humanitarian of the Year Grace Young, and Lifetime Achievement Award winner Martin Yan, as well as Leadership Award honorees Mónica Ramírez of Justice for Migrant Women; Irene Li of Mei Mei Dumplings and Prepshift; Erika Allen of the Urban Growers Collective; Mavis-Jay Sanders of Drive Change; and the “Emerging Leadership” of Oakland’s Understory.
Congrats, all!
Lists I like – It’s time for Eater’s useful “Most Anticipated Restaurants” lists yet again. Spring editions now out in: Atlanta; the Bay Area; Chicago; Houston; Las Vegas; London; Los Angeles (check out the curvy-brutalism™ of Workshop!); New Orleans; New York; Philadelphia; Portland, OR; and more out or coming soon, I’m anticipating.
Oh, and the SF Chronicle jumped in with their own Bay Area version too, FYI.
The Media – Tweet from Bettina Makalintal on Tuesday: “Some news. This is my last week at Bon Appétit. On Monday, I'm joining Eater as a senior reporter.” For now, you can find her on: Twitter; Instagram (selfie central for the host stand); and TikTok. Personal site / bio here.
Some Sad News – In New York, “Domenico DeMarco, who founded Di Fara Pizza in 1965, has died. He was a link between the cooking of Southern Italy and the city’s corner-slice culture.” DeMarco gets the rare Pete Wells NYT obituary treatment, with lines like: “If Mr. DeMarco could use a gas oven to bake pizza that made you see the sun glinting off the Bay of Naples, then so could other cooks. They probably wouldn’t equal Mr. DeMarco’s stolid fastidiousness, but they could try.”
And last but not least: No Love Lost – I think it’s safe to say that the collapse of talks around the Restaurant Revitalization Fund also means the end of the vague lobbying alliance between the National Restaurant Association and the Independent Restaurant Coalition.
The NRA tweets: “Spending package to fund the government through 2022 fails to help 177,000 restaurants who were approved for but never received grants last year from the [RRF].”
IRC’s Tom Colicchio replies: “Thanks for nothing, as an organization you have worked against funding for independent restaurants.”
And just like that, a restaurant industry lobbying group rivalry is out in the open. Congrats to K Street.
And that’s it for today. Except of course for the Family Meal that went out to paying subscribers on Tuesday, which is copy / pasted below as usual.
I’ll see paying subscribers here Tuesday, and everyone else on Friday for next Family Meal.
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Instagram, and send tips and/or the sun glinting off the Bay of Naples to andrew@thisfamilymeal.com. If you like Family Meal and want to keep it going, please chip in here. If you got this as a forward, sign up for yourself!
Here begins the Family Meal that went out to paying subscribers on Tuesday, March 15th. If you wished you were getting Tuesdays’ on Tuesdays too…
Coi out, Induction in, STK everywhere, and more…
Hello Tuesday,
Things continue to be uncertain here in Hong Kong, and at this point my young family is plotting a (temporary) exit, which may mean a disruption to Family Meal at some point TBD, but I’ll keep it all above board and appreciate your patience!
Zoom school is still in indefinite effect here, dining out as a party of five means spreading ourselves across three chaotic two tops, and anything fun you can imagine (public or paid) is pretty much closed. We took the kids hiking up to Victoria Peak to get ice cream this weekend, and as they licked their M&M gelatos in sprinkle cones (my kids have taste), a loudspeaker blared looping warnings about fines for not social distancing and mask wearing. A cop car idled nearby, to make sure we got the point. Spring, 2022.
At least two food writers I know have left (one hastening what had been a planned permanent departure for later this year; one taking a break from the city while this blows over), and I’ve heard whispers of a chef exodus as well. Everyone who can leave is at least thinking about it.
And these are the just the relatively minor inconveniences of the young and vaccinated. Others are not so lucky.
But you are here for US restaurant news!
Let’s get to it…
The End of an Era – In San Francisco, “Daniel Patterson’s acclaimed fine dining restaurant Coi has permanently closed, marking the end of chef’s reign in the Bay Area.” Per Janelle Bitker in the Chronicle: “The restaurant hasn’t served diners since the pandemic began. In a statement on Instagram, Patterson claimed lenders refused to let him reopen. ‘I proposed a remodel and to reopen with a fresh vibe, but they still said no,’ he said. ‘It breaks my heart to lose a restaurant I put so much love and so much of my life into.’”
Thus ends one of the strangest restaurant group runs of the last several years, a mix of star chasing (Coi), b-corp celeb chef collab failure (Locol), and radical inclusion and/or POC tokenism depending your perspective (Kaya, Dyafa, Besharam). A wild ride.
(Fun fact: After leaving Coi for the Bocuse d’Or in 2019, Matthew Kirkley moved to Hong Kong and is cooking at Belon here these days. I think.)
And speaking of Bay Area lenders… Headline in Eater SF: “Charles Phan’s Whiskey Bar Hard Water Hit with Eviction Notice for $400,000 in Unpaid Rent.”
The Ghosts – “Reef Technology and The One Group — parent to STK and Kona Grill — have partnered for a delivery-only operation in Austin, Texas, The One Group announced during its fourth quarter earnings call on Monday. This seems to be ghost-kitchen specialist Reef’s first fine-dining collaboration.” NRN’s Holly Petre reports One Group CEO Emanuel N. P. Hilario downplayed the move as a “test” and “not part of our core strategy” which “is still capturing the 200 opportunities plus for STK and 200-plus for Kona Grill.”
In other words: One if by land. Two if by ghost. Get ready for an STK/
Kona land-grab one way or another!
The Configuration – In the NYT, Melissa Clark makes “The Case for Induction Cooking.” It’s mostly geared toward home cooks, but if you’re willing to take some commentary from the comfort of Eric Ripert’s homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons, there is some industry food for thought here: “‘It’s so much more precise than watching a flame. You can really focus on your cooking and pay attention to what’s inside the pan, not what’s underneath it,’ [Ripert said.] He hasn’t yet converted his restaurant kitchens,” at least in part because they just installed new gas stoves last year. “‘But, if the gas stove broke, I’d consider it,’ he said, adding that he thought his cooks would adapt quickly. ‘After a few days, they’d all love it.’”
Per Clark, “That is just what happened with the chef Justin Lee of Fat Choy n Manhattan, although he wasn’t expecting it. Mr. Lee discovered other advantages over the summer: His kitchen did not get as ferociously hot as it would have with a gas stove, and the absence of open flames also led to a decrease in burns.”
Thoughts?
And last but not least: For Design Fans – Check out the color choice at “Bottle Club Pub, San Francisco’s New Throwback Homage to American Whiskey” from the Future Bars group. Eater’s Lauren Saria calls it “bold neon green accents,” but from what I can see in Patricia Chang’s photospread, “accent” is an understatement. And I’m… kind of into it? I mean, maybe I’d get sick of it after a year, but at least they deserve some points for going with a green other than emerald.
Not that there’s anything wrong with emerald.
Happy St. Patrick’s Day (Thursday)!
I’ll see you all here Friday for next Family Meal.
And don’t forget to follow me on Twitter and Instagram, and send tips and/or 200 opportunities plus for STK to andrew@thisfamilymeal.com. If you like Family Meal and want to keep it going, please chip in here. If you got this as a forward, sign up for yourself!