when you want, where you want.
New York Wins Big at the James Beard Awards
Photo: Daniel Boczarski/Getty Images
Vijay Kumar is on a roll right now. Last night, Kumar took home the James Beard Foundation Chef and Restaurant Award for Best Chef: New York just a couple weeks after the New York Times named his restaurant Semma the city’s best. Ending a yearslong dry spell, Kumar was one of a few big winners from New York. (The full list of winners can be found here.)
The city took home a handful of significant awards, including the three biggest national honors. Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr were named Outstanding Restaurateurs one year after opening their refurbished rendition of Le Veau d’Or. Chef Jungsik Yim, whose restaurant Jungsik helped pave the way for the ascendancy of modern Korean food here, nabbed Outstanding Chef, while Atomix — whose chef worked at Jungsik — got Outstanding Hospitality. Meanwhile, the always-mobbed Superbueno received a nod via the Outstanding Professional in Cocktail Service (that’s a mouthful) for Ignacio “Nacho” Jimenez.
This is the first big showing for New York in a while. Last year, the sole winner from the city was the fine-dining chef Charlie Mitchell, then of Clover Hill. (He has since moved to Saga, the restaurant in the sky from Kent Hospitality.) The year before, it was Junghyun Park. Both won deservedly for Best Chef: New York. But New York was shut out of national awards those years, and some saw it as part of the Foundation making an intentional turn toward smaller cities.
Related