Booby Prize?

The James Beard Awards, the industry’s Oscars, have long ignored a long list of qualified local chefs. Over the last four years, only Lucia Watson (three nominations) and Aquavit’s Roger Johnsson (one) were nominated for Best Chef Midwest. Senior editor Adam Platt and I were each invited to be one of twenty-five judges in the Midwest region for 2007, and I looked forward to righting the wrong. I also decided to look into how the awards are doled out. Now that I know, I’m not so sure that I won’t be merely perpetuating the injustice, but on Omaha.

Here’s the story: Each fall, there is an open call for nominations in each U.S. region Beard offers awards. Chefs may even submit their own name. Then they must survive an initial cut intended to whittle each oversized regional list down to a manageable number. Who makes this first trimming? The Beard Foundation’s seventeen-member national Chefs and Restaurants Awards Committee, made up largely of East and West coast food luminaries. They compile the first ballot of twenty candidates for our award, Best Chef Midwest. To be on it, someone like Alex Roberts of Alma, never recognized by Beard, would have to be sure that the seventeen luminaries knew his food, which is iffy. Then the regional group of twenty-five judges, in conjunction with assorted previous winners, narrows the list to five nominees for a final ballot. It is sent back to the national and regional judges and previous winners for the selection of Best Chef Midwest.

What’s wrong with this picture? Even the lion’s share of regional judges come from larger cities, which explains why the last three Best Chef Midwest winners were from Chicago. All judges are asked to use an honor system and only vote for chefs from restaurants they have actually eaten at or whose food they are familiar with. No provisions are made for judges to visit restaurants, and the voting is not weighted for average, so if somehow a Twin Cities chef makes it to the final five, the only votes would be those who have eaten in his or her restaurant. This skews the results toward communities with the most regional panelists or those with a lot of foodie tourism, such as Chicago.

The group making the final vote is not even required to visit the final five nominees’ restaurants. Now you realize why restaurants go to such great lengths and expense to host dinners at the Beard House in Manhattan and cook at swanky fundraisers. It’s a way to familiarize the “academy” with their cooking, since who comes to Minneapolis or Omaha? This system also favors restaurants with big marketing budgets, a very small slice of the pie indeed.

Now you know why Lucia Watson has been a repeat nominee: most regional panelists and previous winners are familiar with her name because they keep seeing it on the ballot. She will probably win an award soon, to make up for not giving her one ten years ago when she was perhaps most deserving in the pantheon of local chefs.

For 2007, Chicago and the Twin Cities are no longer in the same region. The revamped Midwest now comprises Iowa, Kansas, the Dakotas, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, and Missouri, so the same problems that plagued our local best chefs will now be visited on Omaha’s, until provisions are made to enable all judges to test the food of the nominees.

The Beard folks say that given the cost and logistical hurdles involved in doing that, the current system is the best they can manage, but I'm not impressed. As consumers of award marketing, you shouldn't be either. It's not that the Beard award winners aren't worthy, it's just that so many others were passed by in ignorance of their work.

Reach restaurant columnist Andrew Zimmern at azimmern@mspmag.com.