James Natsis wrote:Robin,
How do chefs qualify for these nominations? Can you educate folks like me who have heard of the prestigious award, but have no idea how the system works. How do these folks stand out?
Thanks
I can speak to that a little, as I was a judge for the Louisville area for a few years. Basically, they reach out to food writers, food PR people and such all over the country and invite them to make nominations along with a paragraph or two explaining the pick. Sort of like the NCAA finals, nominations bubble up from local to regional to national with Beard Foundation staffers making final calls until they boil it down to the semifinals.
Everyone works independently - there's no communication among judges, and they don't even tell us who our local confreres are = but I did pick up some gossip that Louisville had a smelly reputation for a while because some PR-adjacent judges were pushing their clients rather than making disinterested nominations. I feared that our poor showing some years might have had to do with that, but to be fair, that was intuition based on gossip and nothing official.
Anyway, it's kind of a messy process, but to its credit, it is bottom-up and based on local input, for better or worse.
