Beard Foundation wasn’t giving awards out. Then it changed its mind.
Like many other restaurateurs, Lori Chemla has fought to save her business nearly every day since March. Good news was rare, but she got some a few weeks ago from an unexpected corner: She had won an award for outstanding design from the James Beard Foundation.
A design award? Chemla, the principal owner of Carissa’s the Bakery in
East Hampton, N. Y., was responsible for the look of the interior, but she isn’t an architect. To learn how to make a floor plan, she had walked into dining rooms, kitchens and bars across Manhattan with a tape measure.
The news came as a surprise for another reason. In August, the foundation had issued a news release stating that, beyond some awards it had announced in May, it would not be disclosing winners in any other categories, presumably including the one Chemla was in the running for.
“The uncertainty of this time for our industry is already a hard reality and considering anyone to have won or lost within the current tumultuous hospitality ecosystem does not in fact feel like the right thing to do,” Clare Reichenbach, the foundation’s chief executive, said in the release.
That seemed to be the end of that. Except it wasn’t.
The email Chemla received in September came from architect James Biber, chair of the design awards committee. He congratulated her on her win in what was a new category this year, Outstanding Design of Alternative Eating and Drinking Places. Biber sent similar emails to the winners in the two other categories he oversaw.
He added a caveat: Although their victories were real, Biber said, “the Beard Foundation will not be publicly announcing the awards.” Nonetheless, the winners were told they could, if they wished, mention the distinction “as part of your own office
P. R. efforts.”
How do you publicize an award from a group that doesn’t want to admit that you’ve won? Chemla wasn’t quite sure, so she asked Biber for clarification.
A week later, a foundation employee emailed her and the other winners. The message turned the previous one on its head: The foundation would be releasing the results of the design awards after all, but the winners were asked to stay quiet about it until a virtual ceremony on Sept. 25.
Some nominees and winners have had a hard time keeping up with these switchbacks and swerves.
“To say it’s been a bumpy ride hardly sums it up,” said Joe Sundberg, an owner of Rupee Bar, in Seattle, which won the award for Outstanding Design for restaurants with 75 seats or fewer.
For one of Sundberg’s partners, Rachel Johnson, knowing that other restaurants will never find out if they won a Beard this year makes it a little hard to process Rupee Bar’s good fortune.
“I don’t understand why they had the design and media awards and not the others,” Johnson said. “I feel like they shouldn’t have done any of them. It’s just so confusing for everybody.” Confusion may be the one outcome of the 2020 James Beard Awards that everybody can agree on. The foundation announced the results of its Book, Broadcast Media and Journalism Awards in May, when it still seemed possible that the remaining awards could be handed out in a gala ceremony in September.
Over the summer, though, people involved in the restaurant awards say that urgent meetings were taking place behind the scenes. Some nominees had asked to be taken out of consideration. Others had fallen under suspicion of behavior that might reflect poorly on the awards.
And, according to several people close to the awards, at least one foundation employee had raised a concern that no Black people had won any of the restaurant awards.