The James Beard Awards are often called “the Oscars of the food world,” and not unjustly. There is the same endlessly parsed nominating process, the black ties and red carpet, the instantaneous tweeting as each award is announced inside the cavernous theater, in this case Avery Fisher Hall at New York’s Lincoln Center. And, like the Oscars, it is impossible to separate out praise and politics, admiration from hype. And, as with the Oscars, that can be very frustrating.
As we learned, again, last night.
Gabrielle Hamilton, the chef at Prune and author of the best-selling memoir Blood, Bones, and Butter, won for Best Chef in New York. She was as shocked as anybody else, saying in her acceptance speech that she never thought someone who opens sardine cans and puts them on Triscuits would be standing there. Neither did her rival chefs, who found it hard to believe it had really happened. “I mean, we all love her,” one said to me afterwards. “But…I mean, Come on!”
Hamilton’s pen may have covered her, and by extension the food world, with glory, but she doesn’t wield the same power with her spatula. Prune, her small restaurant on Manhattan’s lower east side, is beloved and influential, but by no means ambitious. As she mentioned in her speech, she does serve sardines and Triscuits at the bar. People love to go there for brunch, but that doesn’t make her a better chef than Wylie Dufresne, whose restaurant a few blocks away people come from other continents to visit. Or Michael Anthony, whose work at Gramercy Tavern helped to galvanize the haute locavore movement nationwide. I won’t say anything about the other nominees, Michael White and April Bloomfield, since I’m friends with both, nor can I claim to have eaten in Prune very often over the years.
But then Hamilton wasn’t there as a chef; she was there as the embodiment of the chef community’s self-image, a tough, eloquent, worldly woman whom nearly everybody rightly admires. The Beard Award was really given for her memoir — and all the press and attention she garnered with it. As with the Oscars, marketing and name recognition can be more important than merit.
