When the news broke that the James Beard Foundation (JBF) wouldn’t be issuing chef and restaurant awards this year — or next year — it was a telling departure from the decision by the Michelin Guide, which bestows its coveted stars and Bib Gourmand designations on restaurants around the world. The tire company’s guide said this month that it plans to release its 2020 California list based on pre-pandemic dining.
I was happy to hear about the JBF’s decision. In this moment when so many assumptions of what a restaurant can and should be have been thrown out the window — when fine dining restaurants have revamped their kitchens to serve barbecue and workers of color have become empowered to speak out against discriminatory working conditions — what does it mean to win? What does it mean to lose?
While the outer narrative of awards bodies is to acknowledge outstanding work, their subtler function is to define what’s permissible or normal in a given industry. That’s why some lauded the 2018 JBF Award winner list of largely Black writers and chefs as a sign that Black contributions to American food culture had reached a significant tipping point. It’s why the kinds of restaurants that qualify for three Michelin stars all seem to look and feel the same: food filtered through the lens of French haute cuisine (or, increasingly, Japanese haute cuisine), hours-long tasting menus and hushed dining rooms where, if you strain a little, you can hear line cooks whisper, “Oui, chef,” somewhere in the background.
The perception of objectivity for awards, whether accurate or not, lends weight to their outcomes: Winners must be better than the rest, and politics or bias have nothing to do with the results.
But now, when the rubric of what constitutes “normal” has been so irrevocably and dramatically disrupted,the rules of who wins and who loses are largely irrelevant. It’s like judging a game of Jenga by dog show criteria. To quote Meghan McCarron in her investigation of the imploded leadership of Los Angeles Times’ food section, “Every institution seems to be failing, and failing us.”
If we are to step away from the culture of the singular chef-god-genius in favor of a more representative model of talking about restaurant culture, as New York Times restaurant critic Tejal Rao has argued, the awards system must be part of that movement. As she writes, “White male chefs who already fit neatly into the stereotype of the auteur are overrepresented, praised for a highly specific approach to fine dining, then rewarded with more investment and opportunities to replicate that same approach.” Think of the awards as a cloning machine, endlessly replicating the same kinds of chefs and menus ad nauseum, because those are what succeed. (It’s the same reason why we’ll have ten “Fast and Furious” movies by 2022 — they make money!)
The JBF noted in its recent announcement that it’s committed to examining its policies and procedures in hopes of removing “any systemic bias,” along with increasing the diversity of its candidate pool. The Foundation cancelled next year’s awards to make time for that audit.
I don’t think awards should go away entirely, since they do represent one of the few opportunities for restaurants and their workers to celebrate in what is undeniably a very difficult and trying field. So here’s what I hope for the new JBFA, if it decides the show must go on: It should consider a broader net of people in consideration for awards, including under-resourced people and teams who cook ambitious, exciting food outside of traditional restaurants. Many cooks and artisans, including many women of color, sell food on Facebook Marketplace or on the streets or enter the catering or institutional cooking worlds because of how they’ve been sidelined or demeaned in restaurants in the past. Ignoring them is ignoring an important and sizable sector of food culture.
There should also be a willingness to rescind past awards from individuals, like Mario Batali and John Besh, who’ve faced substantiated allegations of sexual or violent misconduct against colleagues and staff. And the award system should offer more categories for outstanding service that include workers who aren’t employers or managers, such as career servers and dishwashers, and categories that explicitly recognize individual restaurants as great places to work.
That’s in part what will keep awards relevant: If you look at how the restaurant world has developed since the pandemic, you might notice that some of the most significant shifts have happened because of grassroots work. Echoing the austerity and small-scale projects birthed by the 2008 recession, laid-off restaurant workers have entered the grey market in droves, embracing passion projects — tarts, Laotian sausages, wine clubs, arepas — and finding success outside of the traditional, prestigious restaurant model. Some, like Hunnybee Bundles, which donates proceeds to different social justice organizations with each menu, have mutual aid work baked into their premise.
And workers, like the staff at the James Beard Award-nominated Nyum Bai, have collectively pushed managers and restaurant owners into taking actionable steps toward creating fairer working conditions. In response to a call-out on Instagram and collective action by employees that chastised the restaurant for its “toxic” work culture, the Oakland restaurant issued an apology and statement of actionable ways it was going to do better by its Black and LGBTQ staff.
If there’s anything that this moment has taught us, it’s that the supposedly singular geniuses and heroes shouldn’t be the sole carriers of the burden of making beautiful things and leading everyone else into the future. It’s all of us, and it’s been all of us all along.
On the podcast
This week on Extra Spicy, Justin Phillips and I talk to Toriano Gordon, the rapper-turned-restaurateur whose newish spot, Vegan Mob, has made a huge splash in Oakland’s food scene. Since day one, folks have been lining up outside of the shop for plant-based cheeseburger egg rolls, fried chicken po’boys, Impossible meat tacos and gumbo. We talk with Gordon about finding his place in veganism, meat’s masculinity problem and the not-so-newness of plant-based eating in Black history.
What I’m eating
I covered some of the new restaurants that have opened up since the pandemic began, including Pomella, Burmese spot Herbal and Friends and Family. Here are some other newish spots that I’ve checked out.
El Garage, the breakout quesabirria pop-up in the East Bay, recently opened a highly anticipated brick-and-mortar in Richmond. While the pop-up would generate heinously long lines during its stints at breweries (and at the founders’ family home), the new restaurant has instituted a pre-order system to prevent significant line-ups. I ordered some quesabirria tacos the night before and picked them right up after a wait of 5 minutes. It was a world of a difference, but the tacos were the same: with tortillas dyed saffron from the birria broth and skirts of griddled cheese that looked like freshly set lava.
A new project by a team of cooks (who’ve recently worked at places like Nari, Mister Jiu’s, Saison and Aziza) has been bringing nostalgic Vietnamese food to San Francisco. Claws of Mantis’s set menus feature the kinds of dishes that I grew up eating, yet rarely saw in restaurants: canh chua, made tangy and bitter from tomato, pineapple and Chinese celery; catfish braised in caramel sauce; and bánh bèo, wiggly cakes of steamed rice flour topped with ground mung bean, dried shrimp powder and chicharrón bits. The bánh bèo in particular was just delicate enough, loaded up with all the toppings like the perfect Texas-style nacho. The $65 price point nets a very generous meal for two.
Lobsters are available at the Alioto Lazio Fish Company in Fisherman’s Wharf, and you can get them cooked and cracked open if you order a day in advance. I grabbed one for dinner and chopped up the meat, tossing it in a bowl with Kewpie mayonnaise, garlic chives and just a touch of mentaiko, or salted pollack roe. The whole mass went on a bed of salad greens and chopped black cherry tomatoes, with a side of toasted challah.
Recommended reading
• For my readers who also are dealing with smoky air at home, I’d like to recommend this lovely remedy by Sarah Kirnon of Miss Ollie’s in Oakland. It imbues your space with a very relaxing, spa-like aroma. I’ve been boiling the same pot of citrus and garden herbs all day, and it helps a lot.
• Speaking of smoke, the Californian farmworkers who’ve likely picked the greens most Americans will eat for lunch today are still working amidst the blazes that have erupted in the state last week. The growing season doesn’t stop, heat wave or pandemic or fires be damned. As it turns out, there are no specific labor rules for working in smoky conditions, and agricultural workers are in danger of running out of the N95 masks that enable them to work in these conditions.
• Bay Area chef Selasie Dotse displayed a lot of courage in this piece she wrote for Eater, wherein she describes the myriad ways in which her Blackness has been made an issue at restaurants she’s worked at here. She entreats restaurants and their owners to go beyond performative displays of solidarity and actually make their workplaces fair for workers like her. I think it’s a fascinating move on Eater’s part to include the responses of the workplaces she names in a sidebar — what do you think of that?
• KQED writer Nastia Voynovskaya tried and failed to grab a Basuku cheesecake, so she made her own version, based on the Bon Appetit recipe. She ended up distributing slices to loved ones, which, incidentally, is how I divided up my last Basuku cheesecake, too. Good to know it’ll serve as an effective currency during the post-capitalist apocalypse.
• I love this story about the origins of asafoetida, the spice that appears often in regional Indian recipes. Writer Vidya Balachander takes that history and, brilliantly, contextualizes its use in the history of caste politics in India, demonstrating how the spice’s popularity has a deeply political meaning.
Bite Curious is a weekly newsletter from The Chronicle’s restaurant critic, Soleil Ho, delivered to inboxes on Monday mornings. Follow along on Twitter: @Hooleil
"complete" - Google News
August 24, 2020 at 06:00PM
https://ift.tt/3jcPjr4
Restaurant awards don't have to be a complete disaster - San Francisco Chronicle
"complete" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2Fvz4Dj
https://ift.tt/2YsogAP
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Restaurant awards don't have to be a complete disaster - San Francisco Chronicle"
Post a Comment