for full list of Foodie Awards winners

In a year where local restaurants had to pivot, so too did the Orlando Sentinel Foodie Awards

The Orlando Sentinel Foodie Awards, I am convinced now having gone through two of them, may very well be the death of me. Probably something cardiac. Perhaps choking. Or, if this year is any indication, the depth of responsibility I feel when compiling the winners.

Imagine me leaning forward conspiratorially as I whisper to you the following: I don’t know if you know this, but there are a lot of good restaurants in Orlando.

It’s hard picking a No. 1 for almost anything.

Part of me wants to re-award the venues I know deserve the nod just as much as last year. Part of me wants to give props to new or previously unknown places

I’ve since discovered, places I want you all to know about. The minutiae of what makes one burger or taco or ice cream cone better than another is subjective, the lines between them thin as threads. It’s not unlike the Olympics, where gold, silver, bronze and bupkis are oft decided by tenths of a second.

And so, I present to you my veteran ideology: The Foodie Awards are not a zero-sum game. There will be repeat winners. There will be new ones. And when there are, it is not because the previous year’s No. 1 are any less exemplary. It’s just because so many venues deserve recognition.

Especially in a year that stretched everyone to their limits.

2020 saw our city’s culinary professionals masking up to navigate the unprecedented, trying their hardest to pay bills, retain employees, find products and change their business models, throwing every idea against the wall to see what stuck while working to ensure customer comfort and confidence.

We lost some. We gained others. We watched emotionally as the community came together again and again in support of their favorites and how some, miraculously, thrived and grew. And man, did we eat a lot of takeout.

There’s no “Best Newcomer” category in this year’s Foodies. Instead, we’ll be featuring a few standouts in an upcoming piece that will mark the anniversary of the shutdown, a story that will salute the brave souls who ventured into a broken market and the venues that struggled, strove and ultimately survived.

They did so because of you. Orlando locals’ passion for the restaurant scene kept all these boats floating and the proof is in this year’s voting tallies. Readers didn’t merely break last year’s record, they decimated it, logging more than 106,000 votes to push their favorites to the top of each category — a 40-plus percent increase in engagement!

Now, that’s a “new normal” we can get on board with.

Speaking of, we’re hoping next year’s Foodie Awards will be an exercise in pre-COVID normalcy. I’m just hoping I can keep my weight in check.