Houston bar is finalist for Beard Award
Other local eateries shut out in 2018 culinary awards
Anvil Bar & Refuge, the pace-setting cocktail bar founded by Bobby Heugel was named Wednesday a national-level finalist for Outstanding Bar Program in this year’s James Beard Awards.
Anvil Bar & Refuge, the pace-setting cocktail bar founded by Bobby Heugel, was named Wednesday as a national-level finalist for Outstanding Bar Program in this year’s James Beard Awards. Anvil will compete with five other establishments across the country for the title, to be awarded at the Beard Foundation’s annual ga- la in Chicago on May 7.
Heugel wasn’t expecting the nomination. The day before Wednesday’s official announcements, he booked a flight for Chicago Style, a new cocktail conference scheduled for right after the Beard awards gala. At their weekly meeting, his staff asked him why he didn’t wait to see whether Anvil made the finals or not. “After eight years of being a semifinalist, I said, ‘That’s not gonna happen, y’all,’ ” recounted Heugel.
It did. But despite a record crop of Houston semifinalists for the James Beard Foundation’s prestigious culinary awards, not a single local chef made the final cut for this year’s Best Chef Southwest title.
And except for Anvil, none of the Houstonians in the running for six different national-level awards made it through the voting to the finalist level. Eight local chefs, three restaurants and a restaurateur were frozen out of
the competition.
It’s a poor showing in a year when the city has received increasing recognition as a national dining capital. Various factors may account for the outcome, including the fact that Houston is not yet as popular a travel destination as other cities in the region, including Austin, San Antonio and Santa Fe — all of which won finalist slots for Best Chef Southwest this year.
The voting body for the Restaurant and Chef Awards, widely considered to be the Oscars of the food world, includes hundreds of culinary professionals and past awards winners from around the U.S. All sign a form certifying that they will not vote for any restaurant they have not dined in, or for any chef whose food they have not eaten — so travel is a strong key to the finalist list.
The lack of a high-profile food and wine festival also hurts Houston’s Beard prospects. Cities like Austin, Miami, Charleston draw scores of the Beard voting body every year, and events like SXSW or Jazzfest in New Orleans can help as well.
Then, too, Houston competes in a region that is overloaded with large cities, including San Antonio, Dallas, Denver, and Phoenix/Scottsdale, plus regional vacation favorites like Santa Fe and Austin.
Another possible factor is that a large number of semifinalists in any given city can mean they cannibalize each other’s votes. This year Anita Jaisinghani of Pondicheri, Ryan Pera of Coltivare, Ronnie Killen of Killen’s Steakhouse, Trong Nguyen of Crawfish and Noodles, and cochefs Ross Coleman and James Haywood of Kitchen 713 all were in the running for Best Chef Southwest. This years contenders
In the end, of course, it’s a crapshoot. Houston has brought home Best Chef Southwest honors three times in recent years, with wins by Chris Shepherd for the about-to-be-late Underbelly; Justin Yu for the late Oxheart; and Hugo Ortega for the classic interior Mexican restaurant, Hugo’s. The city will get lucky again.
And in the meantime, more local establishments are being recognized for the highly competitive national-level awards, where Houston has long scored few semifinalist slots. This year it had contenders for Best New Restaurant (Xochi); Outstanding Pastry Chef (Jillian Bartolome); Outstanding Restaurateur (Tracy Vaught of H Town restaurant group); Outstanding Service (Hugo’s); Outstanding Wine Program (Pappas Bros. Steakhouse); and Rising Star Chef (Martha de Leon, formerly of Pax Americana, who recently moved to Seattle).
Not to mention Anvil, the painstaking cocktail staple on the Montrose Westheimer Curve that over the years has maintained such high quality. Heugel opened the bar in 2009 along with then-partner Kevin Floyd, who went on to launch the craft beer emporium Hay Merchant.
From the beginning, Anvil introduced the city to a whole spectrum of well-made classics and precise modern inventions.
One of Anvil’s innovations, inaugurated early in its history, was a list of 100 classic cocktails that guests were invited to check off as they sampled them over time — the equivalent of a birder’s life list. Eight original cocktails were always on offer, too, along with seasonal specials, plus a dozen or so carefully selected beers on tap.
Anvil familiarized a generation of Houston cocktail-lovers with house-made bitters, too, a practice that Heugel continued from his early days behind the bar at Beaver’s.
Heugel has always made education a priority at Anvil, organizing classes around various spirits and traveling widely to source high-quality, unusual products. His enthusiasm for agave spirits grew and refined itself at Anvil, ultimately leading him to open sister project The Pastry War, an agave-centric downtown bar.
Anvil ultimately spawned a range of influential siblings that include not only The Pastry War, but also Alba Huerta’s Julep, Heugel’s downtown Tongue-Cut Sparrow, the downtown charity bar, Okra, plus Better Luck Tomorrow in the Heights. ‘Humbling and intimidating’
Competing against Anvil for the Outstanding Bar Program award are Cure in New Orleans; Clyde Common in Portland; Bar Agricole in San Francisco; Trick Dog, also in San Francisco; and Kimball House Bar in Decatur, in the Atlanta metroplex.
To Heugel, the national scope of the finalist nod, “out of all the crazy incredible options in the United States,” means something special. “This never would have happened when we opened Anvil, and it’s so amazing to have been part of what this city has become over the past decade,” he said.
“That’s sort of humbling and intimidating to think about, I’m not sure what it means about our bar, but I know that it means something very special about Houston — that people value what our city contributes to the bar and restaurant world beyond our city limits.”
Heugel lives two blocks away from Anvil. He and Floyd built out the space themselves, and it was never about luxury, theatrics or high design. The luxury was in the fine ingredients, the little details — and in the talents behind the bar.
“There’s been so many special people who have worked there, so many of them going on to do incredible things in our city and places as far away as Shanghai,” said Heugel.
The Anvil staff is excited by the recognition, said Heugel. “I’ll talk to them this week about how more than anything this means people will walk into our bar with even bigger expectations than before, and that somehow, we will have to meet them.”