Kit Wohl - The James Beard Foundations Best of the Best: A 25th Anniversary Celebration of Americas Outstanding Chefs

SUSAN UNGARO, PRESIDENT OF THE JAMES BEARD FOUNDATION
with MITCHELL DAVIS, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE JAMES BEARD FOUNDATION

Looking back on the last 25 years, its hard to believe how much American food and food culture has evolved. When the James Beard Foundation was founded in November 1986 by Peter Kump, Julia Child, and other friends and colleagues of James Beard, no one could have imagined that there would one day be two 24-hour television networks devoted to food programming and that just about every other station would have some sort of popular food content as well. Who could have conceived of anything like the Internet, let alone the hundreds of thousands of food blogs, the millions of people exchanging real-time information about restaurants and chefs and recipes and everything else? It would have been hard to envision a world where Gourmet magazine was electronic, just as it would have been impossible to think of using a mobile phone to search a recipe database to decide what to make for dinner.

At the center of all of this excitement and enthusiasm for food has been the chef. The original mission of the Beard Foundation was to shine a spotlight on the men and women who prepared the food we loved in celebrated restaurants, both new and old. The first chef to cook a dinner at the James Beard House was a young, dynamic Austrian chef from California named Wolfgang Puck whose restaurant Spago was wildly popular for inventive pizzas and other creative dishes. After Pucks dinner in January 1987, Peter Kump sent a thank-you letter noting that the success of his event gave the Foundation the idea of doing similar guest-chef benefit dinners monthly. In addition to providing a performance space for chefs from around the country and helping to raise money for the Foundation, Kump explained that these monthly dinners would be the start of a tradition for showcasing new chefs who have not yet received recognition.(That would prove to be a prescient statement, as Puck went on to win the first award for Outstanding Chef that was given four years later and then in 1998 became the only chef to win the award twice.)

As you make your way around the worlds great food cultures, the chef doesnt always take center stage. Sure, French chefs are a prized part of Frances cultural patrimony. But in Italy and Thailand, two great food cultures in their own right, big names in the kitchen are arguably less important than the food prepared in homes and local, casual eateries. Even in France, a rich regional food culture informs the palates of the populace before they sit down at the countrys great tables. By contrast, in America, where our food culture has come to us top downvia experts such as James Beard and the chefs he inspiredand where the notion of celebrity is a byproduct of Hollywood, it was only a matter of time before the handsome men and women in starched white jackets and checked pants began to get their due.

By the end of 1990, the Beard Foundations program calendar had expanded from one dinner per month to 15. In an article about a Beard Foundation event orchestrated by Oklahoma chef and Beard friend John Bennett, the New York Times called the Beard House a shrinewhere the nations top culinary talent [are] showcased. Still, the Foundations directors were looking for other ways to turn up their spotlight on American chefs. The James Beard Foundation Awards were born.

The James Beard Awards were formed in the fall of 1990 by combining two previously existing awards programs, one for books, one for food-world luminaries, and by creating a third program specifically designed to recognize the accomplishments of chefs and restaurateurs. The book awards began their life in 1966 as the R.T. French Tastemaker Awards. By the time the Beard Foundation assumed the administration of them, they were 25 years old and they had become the most prestigious awards for culinary books. Beard himself had won the Cookbook of the Year award in 1972 for