The James Beard Award goes show trial
Eric Felten
In the popular imagination, the demanding chef is a fun and familiar figure. Gordon Ramsay screams more obscenities than the coxswain of a crew of girl rowers. But all is better within a day or two, even if the Ramsay-coached restaurants regularly fail a month or two later. Or take the psychopathic kitchen cult leader played by Ralph Fiennes in last year’s The Menu. For the dinner’s fourth course, he invites sous chef Jeremy to kill himself.
So, we thought chefs were supposed to be tough. Well, so much for the image of that toque-topped tyrant, the brûlée brute, the vicious master of viscous matters. Some seem to have allowed themselves to be interrogated by private detectives hired by the James Beard Foundation, which doesn’t want its awards going to anyone of questionable character. “James Beard Foundation, Whose Awards Honor Chefs, Is Now Investigating Them,” goes the New York Times headline of an article that explains how the awards organization is having potential honorees looked into like a cheating spouse or a suspected criminal for any wrongdoing. Hourslong “interrogations” of chefs for unspecified charges by hired private investigators can be spurred via an “anonymous tip line.” Isn’t self-described “liberalism” such a wonderful friend to liberty?
A BURNING DISSENT FROM OVERBEARING ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY IN THE KITCHEN
This news about the way Beard awards now work via show trial as described by the New York Times makes the would-be winners of Beard Foundation awards a little disappointing. These titans of the broiler take no guff in the kitchens where they rule supreme, and then when private detectives hired by the Beard organization call, they crumple like an empty sack from McDonald’s? Not only do the chefs dutifully reply, they let themselves get bullied onto Zoom calls with the detectives and do their best to answer anonymous accusations? They are like Kafka’s K, who tried to defend himself against who knows what. At least K never had to get on Zoom.
I have a Beard Foundation award on my wall. It isn’t for making anything to eat or drink. Rather, it is for scribbling about beer, wine, and spirits. I wonder if, wanting to win, today I would respond correctly to a Torquemada-for-hire.
People being what they are, prizes will always be problematic, as much for those who give them out as for those who take them home. Consider the Oscars. The combined affronts to morals of the standard pool of nominees can’t possibly be as objectionable as the alley-cat ethics of the collected members of the Academy. Who, as the old slogan goes, judges the judges?
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Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?