The 2022 James Beard Awards Restaurant and Chef Semifinalists were announced today and Jill Vedaa and Brandon Chrostowski both made the cut, the only Cleveland representatives to do so.
Vedaa, a semifinalist for Best Chef: Great Lakes (IL, IN, MI, OH), is making her third appearance on the prestigious list and hoping to make the finalist cut for the first time.
Chrostowski, of the EDWINS Leadership and Restaurant Institute, is a semifinalist for in the Outstanding Restaurateur category, which recognizes, “A restaurateur who uses their establishment(s) as a vehicle for building community, demonstrates creativity in entrepreneurship, integrity in restaurant operations, and is making efforts to create a sustainable work culture. Must have been in the restaurant business for at least five years, and they must not have been nominated for a James Beard Foundation Chef Award in the past three years.”
Finalists will be announced on March 16 with winnners being crowned at the James Beard Foundation Awards ceremony June 13 in Chicago.
Voting is a bit different this year, with changes instituted after vocal internal reflection and a New York Times report that pointed out no Black chef won an award in 2020, the last year they were held because of the pandemic.
For one, they were canceled in 2020 and 2021, in part because of the pandemic, but more so out of a need to overhaul the program after several internal rebukes and a New York Times report that revealed not a single Black chef was among the crop of 2020 winners.
New procedures to “remove any systemic bias,” “increase the diversity of the voting body” and “increase transparency in how the Awards function” were installed.
The lowdown on the past and present from our sister paper the Orlando Weekly:
Restaurant and Chef Awards Subcommittee members comprised of industry authorities including chefs, restaurateurs, food writers and critics produce the list of semifinalists after which the ballot is distributed online to a larger voting body who whittle the list down to five finalists per category.To get on that short list, chefs need the votes of this electoral college. In the past, the trick was to get these members to eat at their restaurant, a proposition that’s proven difficult for some.
But this year, things are different. Now that the semifinalists have been announced, Tasting Panelists, tasked with visiting the nominated restaurants, will help determine the finalists via a ballot, as will Subcommittee members and the Scouts who’ve actively searched for said candidates.
Once the five finalists in each category have been determined, a judging form will be sent out to all Restaurant and Chef Awards Committee members and Tasting Panelists who will visit all the finalists and score their experiences based on a number of criteria.
This article appears in Feb 23 – Mar 8, 2022.