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Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, I'm welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. Jerry's here too, and that makes this Stuff you Should Know.
Let's see that's right.
This is about James Beard, the Human and the James Beard Foundation and awards. Big thanks to Dave Brus who
helped us put this together. And I also got a lot of stuff from a writer, a bunch of interviews in magazine articles on this guy, John Birdsall, who wrote a book called The Man Who ate too much about James Beard, about James Beard and James Beard through the lens of sort of what it was like to be a closeted gay man, and then you know, starting in the early nineteen hundreds in the United States.
Yeah, one of the things about the Internet is is when something comes along that's kind of definitive, most of the stuff that turns up on a search engine is interpretation of that. Yeah, it's a bunch of different reviews of in this case of a book or think pieces, you know, based on the book whatever. But if you dig hard enough, you can find like pre you know, definitive articles as well. And this is a case of that.
And it's really interesting to see things that were written about James Beard in nineteen eighty ninety seven or yeh, twenty ten or whatever, anytime before twenty twenty when John Birdsall's book came out, and it's just totally different. It's so much more surface level and accepting him as who he was basically or taking on face that he was who he seemed to be. And then now after that, it's like there's meditations on you know, whether he actually hated being gay, like a friend said he did or
did he hate being gay in the mid twentieth century. Like, it's just a completely different approach to James Beard. And certainly it's a lot more robust and well rounded and thoughtful. But in some ways it's like, man, it's too bad we can't go back to the happier interpretation of James Beard. But that's just not how it goes.
Yeah, So who we're talking about is, like you said, James Beard. If you are into food, if you're into restaurants, if you are into cooking shows and reading cookbooks and foodie culture, then James Beard is a very big name. Because if you get a James Beard Award for your podcast or your restaurant critic column or your cookbook or most importantly for your restaurant, yeah, or as a chef,
then that means big. That means fame and fortune and all the things that go with winning a major award, as if it were a Tony or an Oscar or a Emmy or whatever.
Yeah, because that is generally how it's viewed as the Oscars of.
Food until the Oscar said stop saying that.
Yeah they did. Apparently. The James Beard Awards were broadcast of Food Network in the nineties and they call it the culinary Oscars, right, and the Oscars. Yeah, they were like, please, please don't do that anymore. We're going to see you.
Yeah, and we'll get into his early history. But he is or was a chef and a cookbook right, and a business owner. He was probably the first American celebrity chef and really formed the mold for all to follow of chef as brand. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of food. I saw some cool interviews with different like legendary chefs that were like, he knew more about every type of food you could imagine and every ingredient on planet Earth
than anyone that I've ever met. And this is like Alice Waters and Jacques Papin and like the legendary chefs of the world.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's very highly regarded, highly thought of. And what's amazing is he was self taught. Basically, he had a lot of influences along the way, but he never went to any he never had any formal training in cooking.
Yeah, yet he started what we now call farm to table cuisine and New American cuisine because from the very beginning he was like, it's just got to taste good. It's simple ingredients put together in a non fussy way is the way it's best to cook and eat. And now that's people are all about that. But that's sort of a more recent sort of resurgence of that kind of thing.
Yeah, And I mean if you took him now or back then and just fast forwarded him to now, the only two differences would be he'd be allowed to be out as Carrie and he would have to get both of his sleeves fully tatted. Right, That's it, because that's like, it's we just finally kind of caught up to his vibe, totally established it.
All right, So should we go back to the beginning. Let's all right, let's go back to Portland, Oregon then in nineteen oh three. I can't imagine what Portland could have possibly been like growing up as a kid in the nineteen tens and teens, but.
There's a lot of horses and rugged people probably so.
In his own memoir, he.
Semi accurately just described his life as very idyllic, in the sense that from the very beginning he grew up eating great food. For a couple of reasons, one or for three reasons. Early one is because where he lived in Oregon near the coast. They had great fresh seafood everywhere and forest everywhere, so these great wild berries and vegetables, organic stuff, because that's just everything was basically organic, pre
mass farming and pesticide. And the other two reasons are that his mom, who was an english woman named Elizabeth Beard, was very much into good food and like making sure her son ate like really great stuff and the finest things. Because they had some money in there. He was pretty spoiled. Yeah,
I think so. And then the other was his who ended up being kind of a godfather because apparently his dad wasn't a very good guy, which was a Cantonese immigrant chef who was the chef of the house name jew Lette, who they were very very close and from a very early age, James Beard was exposed to Chinese and Asian cooking, Cantonese cooking in particular. I believe that jew Lette was also a master breadmaker, and Portland has
one of the oldest China towns in the US. So as a young kid, he was being exposed to all kinds of great cuisines thanks to the I think live in chef.
Yeah, and if you put those two together you get a really good approximation of what he did. He took He created American cuisine at a time like when he really kind of became a public figure. It was at the exact same time that we were learning how to make frozen foods and building TV trays, and there's a whole g whiz thing to like aluminum foil and stuff like that. So he pushed against that and said, no,
we want fresh stuff, we want seasonal stuff. You don't want stuff that was picked six months ago and frozen ever since. And a lot of America was like, yeah, we dude, this is amazing. This is like the space age in the future.
Sit down.
And then the other the Giulette influence was to take other cultures dishes and americanize them in certain ways, just swapping out ingredients, changing the name, and just making it that much more approachable. But it's still something that you know, it's still an exotic dish, but it's an exotic dish that he's explaining the average American cook who's interested can go do.
Yeah, for sure.
Like I said, his dad was not a great dude, wasn't around that much. His mom, who I mentioned, was born in England was she ran the family. They had a boarding house called the Gladstone in Portland, and she ran that and apparently was a perfectionist and very domineering. So while she was, you know, orchestrating all these gourmet meals for her young son, I get the idea that it wasn't the easiest sort of home life with her perfectionism and diamondeiring qualities.
Yeah, but you didn't get that from his memoir, which is another good kind of sketch of what he was like. He presented himself totally differently as a public figure then, I don't want to say totally differently, but much differently, especially as he became more and more of a public
figure right than who he was in real life. He was very good at embellishing anecdotes or you know, he realized the value of the backstory to a recipe would make people want to make it more and then they could share that when they cooked it for their friends.
Yeah.
He went to Read College there in Portland and ended up being asked to leave Read College basically expelled his freshman year in nineteen twenty one, because he had a couple of affairs with other students and one with a professor where apparently some of his roommates actually witnessed this, like walked in on them, and they very quietly said,
you've got to get out of here. And I don't know if being gay was illegal in Oregon at the time, but it was illegal in some states, and it wouldn't surprise me if Orgon was one of them.
But they said, you got to get out of here.
And the yearbook hadn't even been published yet, and they erased every mention of him in their yearbook before it published.
Yeah, which, depending on who you ask, either like scarred him for life when he secretly held it as a mark of shame, and maybe that was one of the reasons why he hated being gay, or he just you know, rolled with it and moved on. I'm not quite sure which is correct, but either way, he still had a deep and abiding love for Reid College and left most of his estate to Read College after he died.
Yeah, I'm not I don't know.
I wonder why that happened, because I know they eventually came around once he got famous and were like, oh, he's a very famous reading and they gave him an honorary degree. Many years later, in nineteen seventy six. But I don't know, it still surprises me that he just for being there one year that he I don't know, left in that kind of endowment.
Yeah, not even one year. He didn't even make it through his freshman year. Yeah, yeah, No, it's surprising because he also could have been like, oh you want me to be a ready, now, shove it, but he didn't. He very he was very pleased to have been given an honorary degree. So after college, his little Stanton College, he's like, you know what, I want to be an actor, maybe an opera singer. My family's pretty wealthy, so I'm just going to go to Europe, joining a traveling theater
company and study my craft in Europe. There he learned, I think the hard way that he had a mediocre talent. I saw it described, But in like Paris and London and some of the great European capitals he found like, oh my gosh, there's like these gay communities are just barely on the downlow, Like there, you know, they have great parties and they have their own bars and places
to go, like it's totally unlike America. So in that sense, I think he learned to appreciate being gay, or at least interacting with the gay community for the first time there in Europe, which would have been a great education for him.
Yeah.
And he spent the next I don't know, fifteen or so years moving around a lot, still trying to work in theater and doing also getting involved in cooking some and I think twenty four he moved back to Portland, worked as a radio announcer and again joined another theater troupe. Twenty seven moved to la for a little while and actually got a couple of bit parts in Cecil.
B de Mille movies.
Oh yeah, very small part, so you know, kind of just like you were saying, he apparently he could sing and act.
It just was, you know, he was right there in the middle.
Yeah, but it wasn't like, oh like he had no talent whatsoever, and he was just a rich kid. In twenty eight he went back to Portland, more local theater, and then started spending a lot of time in Seattle, did a semester at Carnegie Tech and Pittsburgh where he studied like scenic design and costume design and stuff. So he was really still trying to do the theater thing, and that's what he was still trying to do when he moved to New York in nineteen thirty seven.
Yeah, and he.
Didn't aspire to be a chef. He basically did it to make ends meet. That's when he started. When he was in New York, he fell in with the gay community there, which was super underground apparently at the time in nineteen nineteen thirties. Even in New York, you couldn't even hint that you were gay, like you just did not, at least not in public. So you couldn't go out to bars because bars didn't want you. They could lose their license if they were caught with a gay person
in their on the premises. So what the gay community did in New York was throw private parties at people's houses. And what he did was he started hiring himself out to cook for these parties. And he got particularly good at creating cocktail party food, finger foods, cannapis or dervs, that kind of stuff, so much so that he ended up making writing his first cookbook on that, which we'll talk about in a second.
Yeah, and this all this New York stuff, this is post prohibition, like there were gay bars in New York pre prohibition, which I didn't even realize. No, I didn't either, but they basically use prohibition once the things started post prohibition, once things finally started opening up again, to say, okay, but here's the deal, like no more gay bars.
Yeah, it's just like history. It's crazy. It's just a back and forth of progressive and conservative, progressive and conservative like a seesaw. It's interesting because you tend to think of everything as kind of moving forward. It would be progressiveness. But it doesn't always, No, it doesn't.
You're talking about those cocktail parties in New York where he was making food. He ended up meeting a very key person in his life named James Cullum, who was a wealthy gay socialite, and he said, hey, why don't you move in with me. I got a spare room and you can kind of be my I thow these huge parties and you're great at this, and you can kind of be my live in cater chef essentially, And it.
Was I saw.
It was like a completely platonic thing. But he moved in.
Through culumn.
He was able to work all these other parties, meet all the sort of well healed gay New Yorkers with money, and like you said, he made quite a name for himself. And he was doing this, like you said, with these sort of simple or dervs and finger foods, that he would make his own. One thing that he's still very famous for was his onion sandwich.
Yeah.
I looked up this thing. I gotta make one now.
Really I was not inspired to, Oh.
Man, I think they looked delicious. I saw Jacqupapine make one. Maybe I had some with sure. But you take some bryoshe and you cut, like use a biscuit cutter or something to cut it into a circle so it doesn't have any crust. You cut two of these. You make up some homemade mayo ideally or dukes of pure in a pinch, and then you spread mayo in each side.
You slice very thinly. You cut an onion in half, and then very thinly slice you know, a half moon of onion and a half moon of onion, and put those together so it is, you know, covering the whole sandwich. And then you spread mayo along the outer rim of this sandwich. Once you put it together, and then roll that in either chopped parsley or some combination of chopped herbs that you like, and it just it looked really good and it looks very simple, and everyone goes nuts
on it. So I've got to try it.
Okay, Well, let me know how it is, and if it is particularly good, I'll try it for sure. And it's not like I'm like that's gross. I just I'm like, this is missing something that would make me want to eat it, like where's the deli meat?
He apparently wealthy, and this is something birds All wrote about that, like wealthy straight parties at the time, they had like really fancy stuff like you know, caviare and truffles, but the food itself, apparently, and the finger foods and sandwiches are all kind of boring, and apparently this stuff was just way better and more creative.
Yeah, so again, he made his name as a catering chef. He founded a company called or derv Inc with a brother and sister, Bill and Irma Roade, and at the
same time he learned a lot from these people. He also learned a lot from a woman named Jean Wilson who was a socialite in New York, and all three of them kind of took him under their wing, taught him things like the value of like going out and finding good ingredients at stores in New York, like how to appreciate wine or at least pretend like you understand how to appreciate wine. From Bill Road. He learned the value of adding a story, a backstory to a dish.
How important that was. And it was another it was if his education came in like peaks and valleys. This was another big peak in his culinary education, you could say. And he went on in I think nineteen forty, just a few years after he started cooking. I think, right, didn't you say it was thirty seven that he really started.
I mean he moved to New York in thirty seven, and I think kind of ditched everything else in like thirty eight and thirty nine.
Okay, So in three years he went from teaching himself how to cook basically hanging out with New York society to writing his first cookbook in nineteen forty, which he claimed over written in six weeks.
Yeah, shortly thereafter. And I guess we'll take a break after this. But he was drafted into the army. I saw he enlisted and that he was drafted. So I'm not sure which is true. But I was all drafted more often than enlisted, and UH that ended his catering business for a couple of reasons. I think even before he was drafted, the food rationing basically ended that catering business.
But he was drafted in forty two UH into a cryptography school and served in the US Seaman Service in places like Brazil and Puerto Rico and Panama and France. So he's in a way still kind of continuing his food education by living in these places with awesome food.
Man, that's super interesting.
Should we take that break, Yeah, let's all right. We'll be right back with Moron James.
Bear Stoffy, Josh, I want to learn about a terris ort and college Taradactyl, how to take a berger bout fractalk Is Khan, that's a little hunt, the Lizzie Boarders, plane everything, and Josi.
Sport up. Jerry.
All right, So I mentioned Gene Wilson, Bill and Irma Road. They had a huge impact on his culinary education. I should say, nothing formal again, like that was just hanging out with the right people who kind of provided this and that and sometimes recipes. He co owned the catering business with them, but the first chance he got to cut them out credit wise, he took in his nineteen forty cookbook can or dirves and Cannipates. There's no mention
of them. There's no mention of any of the order of ink, or of their ownership and order of ink, I should say. And he kind of, at least in retrospect, became a little bit famous for, at the very least put it as nicely as possible, not giving credit where credit is due, at worst, using people and then burning the bridge in an effort to climb ever upward.
I saw that onion sandwich recipe might have even been from the roads. Yeah, I'm not sure about that one hundred percent, but that could be an example.
He wrote.
He was very prolific, wrote a lot of books. From
nineteen forty to nineteen eighty three. He had twenty cookbooks, including nineteen fifty nine sort of his seminal work, the James Beard Cookbook that had it was kind of like a kitchen bible, which apparently he wasn't a big fan of those kinds of books, and this was not even close to his favorite of his own, but it was the best selling and had everything in there from how to make like a French Castle, aid to how to Boil Water, and was I think the first cookbook to
feature the chef on the cover. It was just unheard of to do at the time. It was just you know, the joy of cooking or whatever, you just have text and he was the first person to put his mug on there. And again that's just sort of laid the groundwork for chef as brand. He was this really big guy who was six ' three weighed over three hundred pounds.
He eventually was bald and kind of looked like an Uncle Fester type, but apparently he just had no self consciousness about the way he looked and a bigger person like eating a lot, because he ate a ton and consistently talked about how much he'd loved to eat a lot of food.
So much so that he had one of the first cooking shows, maybe the first televised cooking show in America in nineteen forty six. It was titled I Love to Eat.
That was his catchphrase.
Yeah, he would say that at the either the end of the beginning of everyone. It only ran for a year, and from what I could tell, that was his only TV show. He made some appearances on other shows like The Mike Douglas Show and other stuff like that, but that was his TV show. That was his one TV show. Instead, he ended up making his his name more with like
cookbooks and a cooking school and all of that. But on that show, apparently you can see the beginnings of that chef brand of his, where you know, he had a big appetite but only for delicious food, right, so he had no problem with eating and eating and eating, but it had to.
Be good food.
It wasn't going to waste that on any junk.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I looked for clips of this show. It's really I found a couple of short ones. It's really kind of hard to find stuff because he just didn't preserve you know, we've talked about it before media like they do now. But I did read in one of the birds All interviews where he was saying that despite being in the closet, he would drop he said, gay men at the time, he said they would drop
called what they called hat pins. So just little references or a little the way they said something to kind of as code of like hey I'm gay, like you see what I'm putting down here, and he would do that on his TV show, and he would drop little hat pins just sort of to the gay community at least so they.
Would know that he was gay. But straight people are just like this guy's just so fun.
Yes, I wonder what community does that now, and we don't.
We're not aware of it now. Who knows.
I'd be very curious if you know. Right in But yeah, apparently was. He was very much like that until that first best selling cookbook, that James Beard Cookbook came out. I read that any semblance of that was totally stripped out, and his brand now was a manly man who loved food, and I saw was so is so enthralled by food and the good life that he didn't even like a relationship with women wasn't even on his radar. He was
too busy enjoying life kind of thing. Yeah, that was kind of how he was presented starting in the late fifties.
There's a Instagram guy I follow. I can't I wouldn't be able to pronounce it anyway, because he's like Danish or something. I'm not sure what he is, but he lives in the beautiful mountains of one of those Scandinavian countries.
I don't know.
But his stuff is great because he cooks sort of this like great looking food but in a very tik took way. It's like a big he'll cook it on a big stone that's been heated by this fire he makes himself. But it's like really elevated sort of camping food. And he gives stuff to his dog at the end of everyone and he never speaks or anything.
It's all silent.
Wait a minute, Wait a minute, wait a minute.
Have you seen this?
But is he like a kind of like a wild man and he lives in a tent.
He is a wild man in a tent.
Yes, I have seen it. And he like he'll point to stuff.
Yeah, because he may not speak English.
But I was just thinking, like nothing would make me happier than if at the end of one of these like some guy just walks in from the mountains and they just start making out of the end.
Sure, I'd be like, all right, there you go, in, there you go, James Beard, do it.
So we talked about the fact that he he would present, you know, sort of fancy foods in a simpler way for Americans that may have been intimidated by like you know,
the classic French cooking and stuff like that. And one good example is in his cookbook from nineteen forty nine, the Fireside Cookbook, when he basically made what is an omelet peissant, which is a French for a peasant omelet, but he called it a country omelet, and all he did was a country All he did instead of putting salted pork belly in this omelet that also has potatoes, onions and parsley, was put in smoked bacon, and he called it a country omelet, and it just seemed completely American.
Yeah, that's what he would do. Like he would, I guess in the parlance of today, he would appropriate other cultures food and alter it just enough to make it Americanized. He wasn't doing it from what I could tell, because he was unimaginative, because he couldn't come up with his own stuff. He was from an appreciation of those other culture's dishes, and he was americanizing it not out of a disrespect to that culture originating it, but out of
making it more accessible to American cooks. And in doing that he is credited with basically coming up with American cuisine, and it's hilarious. But it's so American that American cuisine is predicated on other culture's food. And it was a huge debt to front to French cooking, and large part it's because people like James Beard and James Beard in particular took French food and americanized it and made American American cuisine in the process.
Yeah, Dave makes a very good point, like if you think of the nineteen sixties, what might be on in a recipe book or a menurobably, because like you said, that was sort of when TV dinners were all the rage and stuff like that, and it just didn't seem like there was a lot of attention being paid.
To real quality like that. But that's all come back in a big way.
And if you read some of his recipes from the nineteen sixties, and they say, and he's writing about roasted figs and pergudo and sun chokes and savicha and stuff like that, Like, I didn't know about any of that stuff in the eighties and nineties, even probably, and he was writing about the stuff in the nineteen fifties and sixties.
It started to become a thing in the eighties with the yuppies, started to and they can thank James Beard for that.
But you're just thinking of American snacle.
Well, yeah, I'm totally at what is it? Ah?
Is it la cirque? No? No, I shouldn't know.
I don't know. We'll figure it out.
That scene with the business cards.
It's great. So yes, but that's exactly what I was thinking of.
But you're right, so yes.
But before that, like there's an example of him in his TV show in nineteen forty five or six talking about this exotic oil that people should go route out, like it's hard to find, but it's worth it's worth the effort. And it was called olive oil. Yeah, and like this was like this is a time when that was not You could not find that anywhere, maybe in like little Italy, but you did not find it like mass produced in your grocery store like he used large exactly.
And one of the reasons why you find it mass produced in your grocery store now is because James Beard introduced it to America. Like that's the effect that this guy had. He's everywhere. His influence is everywhere still today and not just still today, Like finally today, his influence has really kind of come into full fruition.
Yeah, agreed.
I love talking about food.
And I'm hungry. Should we take that second break?
Sure, let's go. Let's go get some onion sandwiches.
All right, well, and we'll talk about the James Beard Foundation and his legacy right after this.
Stoff, Josh.
Shop stop.
I want to learn about a Terris Hortan College hoadactyl, how to take a perfect movement, all about fractal think is gone.
That's a little hunt the Lizzie and josif we should know no word up Jerry.
Okay, So now we move on. Now that we know the man pretty good. Thirty minutes on James Beard, I think. So we'll talk about his foundation. In the seventies in New York, he bought a townhouse at one sixty seven West twelfth Street in Greenwich Village. And now he was sort of a little more on the down low. He wasn't on TV as much. He wasn't he was still writing cookbooks, but he was. He was just a little
more private. I guess at that point he was free in the seventies in New York, especially in Greenwich Village, to be a little more out. Although you know, apparently he was just sort of a homebody with his longtime partner who was a pastry chef, Gino Cofaci, and would again throw these great parties, these great holiday meals. In nineteen eighty one he started, and this is a big
part of his legacy today. He founded with a restaurant critic Gaale, Green City Meals on Wheels and to date, and this is basically it's not officially Meals on Wheels, but just a similar thing that covers New York City. They have served since nineteen eighty one fifty million meals to people who can't get out of the house in New York.
That's amazing. I was like, wait a minute, was this the beginning of meals on wheels? And no, no, well it's an apparently meals on wheels have been around since the forties. Yeah, so I'm sure we talked about in our Meals on Wheels episode.
But still, that's right.
It's definitely worth tipping your hat to for sure. Absolutely so the whole thing started the James Beard Foundation in an effort to buy back his Greenwich Village townhouse from Reid College. Remember he'd left the bulk of his estate to read. And I get the impression as one of his students who became a colleague, Peter Cump, who kind of took the reins of this and got other people,
including Julia Child, kind of to champion this cause. And it was wildly successful because James Beard died in nineteen eighty five and they owned the townhouse by nineteen eighty six, so then they were like, okay, what do we do next.
Yeah, and he, by the way, he lived to be eighty one, So despite his his size and how much kind of rich foods he ate, eighty one's not too bad, not bad at all. Heart failure finally got him. But in like you said, they got the James Beard House, which they renamed officially James Beard House, still there today.
And I think their first sort of mission was to quote provide a center for the culinary arts and to continue to foster interest the interest James Beard inspired in all aspects of food, it's preparation, presentation, and of course enjoyment. And you know, it was sort of a sort of a humble start I think for what ended up being a very big deal. And part of that was kind of kicked off the very next year, in nineteen eighty seven, when Vodyangpak.
Who is known it's so fun to listen to he is.
I love hearing that guy talk. And at the time, back then he was known as Walter Pagowski. Still is that his name?
Oh god, I believe every joke you tell.
No, I'm killing it.
Oh gosh.
I would love to hear a interview or just a conversation between Wolfgang Puck and Werner Hearts.
Yeah, totally, that would be the best. Bock said, hey, can I can I host at your house?
And they said, sure, you can come and cook at the James Beard House and host a dinner. And it was a big hit apparently, so he said, why don't we do this like once a month, had these big dinners prepared by either big famous chefs or someone who's up and coming, and all of a sudden, the James Beard House itself starts to get its own reputation.
Yes, but I'll bet a dinner there's at once really great and also very trying to hear some of the people around the table talking about it.
Oh man, I want to someone has an end invite Josh and I and you, me and Emily to come.
Okay, yeah, but if I'm sitting there like rolling my eyes. Don't get mad.
The onion sandwich please.
So this Peter Cump guy, he's like, I'm going to memorialize my teacher one way or another. I mentioned Julia Child really, I don't know if we said that. She and James Beer were very good friends. Yeah, and at a time, probably seventies eighties, they were the two most well known chefs in America far and away, which is remarkable because again, neither one of them were formally trained. I think they were both self taught. Yeah, so Julia Child's on board, but Peter Cump is really kind of
running the show here. And they start handing out awards pretty quickly after the Beard House is established and the Beard Foundation is established. And at the time they give the award out for great American chefs, and you could expect a certificate, a commemorative chef knife, chef's knife.
Nice, and that's about.
It at the time for the first few iterations of this award.
Yeah, like, of course, a little recognition for those in the know. But it's not like now where a lot of people now are like, it's a James Beard restaurant, we got to go there totally like just from people watching you know, Food Network and stuff like that in nineteen ninety.
So they just said, bought this house in the.
Like eighty what do you say, eighty seven, eighty six, eighty six, and got things going sort of in the late eighties, and then in nineteen ninety the publisher of The Who's Who of Cooking in America said, you know what, we'd like to sell this property, and come said I'll take it and bought the rights to At the time, it was sort of the best honors book for top chefs, and he said, well, here, let's expand it though, and let's not have just chefs, but let's have food at
critics and restaurants and wine Somlia's and wine people and cookbooks and eventually, you know, podcasts and blogs and let's give awards for all kinds of things. And eventually that became the James Beard Chef and Restaurant Awards that we still have today.
Yeah. I think they actually had them in parallel for a little while, and then they shut down the Who's Who of Cooking in America because those awards were only given out by previous award, so it became kind of an ara Borros. It wasn't very expansive. It was very tight knit. But the James Beard Chef and Restaurant Awards, at the very least were meant to be more far looking than the who's who of cooking in America was. Yes, whether they achieved that or not depends on who you
ask in what year you asked it. But eventually, in the early nineties it started to become a at least that you could see the outlines of the prestigious award that it is today.
Yeah, for sure.
The first awards in ninety one were held on the MS New Yorker Cruise ship, Dinner Cruise Ship and the Best Chef, and they give them out I think New York, Texas, and California now each have are their own region and then everyone else is split up into like Southeast and Northeast and stuff like that.
Can fly over exactly.
But that first year, see if you recognized any of these names. The very first year of those awards, Southeast winner was Emerald Legassi.
Isn't he the one who'd be like, I guarantee No, Well then no, I haven't heard of him.
He's the bam guy.
The Midwest was Chef Rick Bayliss Bobby Flay one rising star chef.
Wasn't he married to the actor from Law and Order Bobby Flaked assistant DA for a while.
Oh, I don't know, Yeah, maybe that's a yes.
A chef Nancy Silverton, who was a legend, won Pastry Chef in ninety one, then one for her restaurant Campanil in two thousand and one, and then one for Best Overall Chef in twenty fourteen, so she's a three time winner.
And if you're wondering who.
Won Best Outstanding or overall Outstanding Chef that very.
First year, hey, look at me. It's a really very fuss winner.
Very nice. That's appropriate because he all put the James Beard House on the map.
Oh and also quickly for you wine lovers, Robert Mondavi won Outstanding Wine and Spirits Professional that very first year.
And Mondavi is now.
Like, you know, a wine led right, and it's hard to stop and imagine. But at the time these were all like unknowns in America, you know. And I don't think it's coincidence that they're all household names now with huge brands and huge, mega money making careers behind them because of the James Beard Awards, at least in some large part.
Yeah, I think restaurants who have been nominated just nominated for a Beard Award says that they typically double their reservations and they increase their sales by twenty to twenty five percent.
Not all though. I saw an interview with a guy named Jason Wilson who had a restaurant called Crush in Seattle back in the mid I think the twenty ten or eleven he won Best Chef and he said, Nope, it did not have that effect people. We talked about it more, but it didn't get more people in the restaurant. From what I can tell, though, he was an outlier in that respect.
Yeah, I thought you were going to say he won in March of twenty twenty and just couldn't understand why people weren't backing up.
Well, he actually did cite the economic downturn is one reason why it wasn't happening, and he was talking about the from the two thousand and eight meltdown was still going. I remember that was that lasted easily until twenty twelve or thirteen, and he won in twenty ten, so he had just in there griping.
So we need to talk about the controversies of the Beard Awards though, because they've had a few things that happened over the years. Any awards ceremony is going to have controversies. That's just how it goes. Anytime you have a body of people doling out awards that are meaningful and economically impactful, it's going to happen, especially.
When it's a group of almost exclusively white people.
Yeah, well that comes up a little later, kind of recently. But in two thousand and four, they had a chairman
named Leonard Pickel I guess senior or junior. I don't think it's pronounced pickle p i c k e l. And he was convicted of grand larceny I think second degree grand larceny for basically stealing about a million dollars in cash or you know, expensing things he shouldn't expense over a three year period, like those are the foundation's money, and they have a lot of you know, scholarships that they dole out too, so that's you know, that's a
big deal if you're stealing from him. He's spent a few years in prison.
The board resigned.
There were a bunch of journalists who were judges that resigned, they came back from that, and then you know, Mario Battally comes along, the me Too movement comes along, and all of a sudden, there's people that are saying, like, wait a minute, a lot of these chefs you're nominating and acknowledging are monsters, either literal sexual assault assaulters or they're just you know, chefs can be well known for being sort of monsters in the kitchen and screaming and
yelling at people, and you know, they have tempers generally speaking.
True, but I saw and it makes a lot of sense. You can really blame food network producers and other network producers who created kitchen based reality shows for perpetuating that and making it seem normal and creating that whole generation of mean, bullying chefs who would just do that without a second thought, thanks to people like Gordon Ramsay doing that on TV for year after year after year.
But they were already doing it in real life.
Yes, true, but there was there's also always been chefs that didn't do that too, and it made it, It made it trendy to do that. It just made it acceptable for so long that it wasn't until the last few years that people really started pushing it back on it and said, no, this isn't normal. It's not okay for our entire industry to be like this. I shouldn't be berated at work every single night. It's not okay.
And so people finally pushed back on it, and the James Beard Awards got caught in the middle of that because they've been awarding all these chefs that were really troublesome people and mean over the years, all these awards award after award after awards, so they were also supporting it indirectly, and you can also make a case directly too. And so once this was kind of established like this is not okay, James Beard Awards, you are the arbiter
of what is who are good chefs? You got to do something about this too, they kind of went back and said, Okay, what are we going to do about this? We've got to do something because at the very least for optics, we can't keep giving these people awards, and who knows, maybe they actually do care about the industry and the people working in the industry, and in that case, they really needed to reconfigure what they were doing and reevaluate it.
Yeah, and it wasn't just you know, monsters in the kitchen, but it was a pattern of like, hey, and this is this is just the history of the restaurant industry. It's like white men are recognized more, they're more at least in the past.
Just the restaurant industry.
Though.
Yeah, it's gotten way way better in the last you know, ten or fifteen years. But you know, for most of restaurant history, it was like white men were the chefs and they were running the show. For the most part. There were exceptions. Of course, it's gotten way way better
now there's much more inclusion. In twenty eighteen, the James Beard Foundation said, we need to make some real changes to a kind of get these bad apples out of the nomination process to begin with, and be more inclusive and sort of think outside our own, you know, box that we've been in for so long about what makes a good chef.
Yeah, totally. So they actually they did do that. They made a concerted effort and were kind of successful pretty much out of the gate, but they became victims of their own ambitions in twenty twenty when they canceled the James Beard Awards, not just for twenty twenty, but for twenty twenty one, and they blamed it on the COVID pandemic, which made sense, but people were also like, well, you know, everybody else has been doing this stuff over zoom, Like, why would you cancel the whole awards.
Yeah.
Apparently an insider in the foundation who was also like either a Shepherd, journalist or whatever, came and told everybody else that's not why they canceled the awards. They canceled the awards because every single person who won this year in reality is white. So they just didn't give out the awards and that caused a huge stir among everybody in the industry.
You know, Yeah, I mean they covered it up. And this was after trying to do the right thing, and they canceled, like you said, the next one just because they were still sort of reeling from what had happened in or they canceled I'm sorry in twenty twenty one because they were still reeling from twenty twenty. Finally came back last year in twenty twenty two with the first awards in I guess three years, and they had a
total overhaul of the committee and how they judge. They're saying that you know, there's an ethics committee now that vets nominees just on a personal level, and then also said and the way we're judging, like we need to think about the criteria in different terms as well moving forward.
Yeah, they still don't have it figured out because this Ethics committee has gotten has become such watchdogs or guard dogs, I should say of James Beard Awards that they hire private investigators to investigate the nominees. Part of the nomination process now is being grill over zoom or probably in person now by private investigators working on behalf of the James Beard Ethics Committee, and that soured people in and of itself. So they've just they're like a pendulum that
somehow misses the middle every time. It just keeps going from once I do another and I think they're on the right track. And somebody gave them credit. They said one chef said that we're seeing. What we're seeing is quote an institution self correct in real time, which is you know, that's fair, and maybe they should take off another couple of years until they get it figured out. But they're trying at least, and they have been successful some years, but they just there's just been misstep after
misstep as they try to figure this out. It's a big systemic issue, and they're kind of like the vanguard of the whole thing, so people are looking to them more than other places too.
Yeah, there were two incidences this past year in particular that made the news. One was that a finalist for Best Chef in the South, an Alabama chef named Timothy Hansis, was disqualified a month before the awards because they were like, he's one of these guys that breaks his staff, even yells at customers. He denied this stuff, said, well, it sounded like he was like, hey, listen, I'm a passionate guy.
But this stuff is not how it's being characterized. But one of the real problems is they didn't communicate that to the committee members that they had disqualified it, like they found out about it in the press and a lot of other chefs and judges, because I think there's like six hundred ultimate judges, the chefs and food writers and journalists all over the country. A few of those quit, one called it fake virtue signaling, one smashed his previous award,
another step down in protest. And then this Kentucky chef named Sam before was a finalist for Best Chef South East, and she said that she was questioned, like given basically no notice, questioned over zoomed by these investigators over social media posts where she had spoken out against domestic violence
and sexual assault. And the way this goes the way this happens is anonymous tipster's calling in, so you can call in and anonymously say anything you want about someone, and all of a sudden you're being investigated without any like prior, you know, warning of what is even going on.
So all of a sudden, she's on this zoom and they're saying that she was it was targeted harassment and bullying because of some tweets that she sent out sort of exposing stories of sexual assault, but she never named anybody. And she told the people, She's like, how can you accuse me of targeted harassment if after an hour you still don't know who I'm targeting, Like I didn't name anybody.
And she was, you know, obviously really upset about this, and it just seems like there's too much secrecy around how it goes down. These investigations. They don't have a real true like day in court for the accused. It's just that they're kind of just almost surprised.
It seems like, and.
You know, before you know it, then they're not in consideration and they're like, well, wait a minute, I didn't even get a chance to plead.
My case in full.
It sounds kafka esque.
Yeah, Bourdain has always been very critical.
He was. He had a lot of bad stuff to say about the Beard Words over the years.
I'm sure, funny stuff, a lot of it about not being inclusive and like, who do you think you're kidding by saying you're now inclusive? Stuff like that, and it's just like he wasn't an award guys. He's kind of like the people who bashed the oscars and just like just a bunch of industry people, you know self, you know, patting each other on the back.
Yeah.
I'll always remember a tweet from him at like right when Baby Driver came out and everybody was crazy for it. All it said was fab driver, but he didn't say f and it was just three words that completely undermined everybody else.
It was really kind of masterful ordine. Love that guy.
So yeah, one thing though, Chuck, just to wrap this all up to me, James Beard is still such an endigma and confusing. I have no idea what he would make of this this award scandal stuff.
Well, I mean, none of the awards came about until he was gone, so he might be like, I don't even like the idea of these awards.
Who who knows not?
Or maybe he would, Yeah, we don't know.
If you want to know anything more about James Beard, there's a lot out there. You can also start with his cookbooks too, which are allegedly quite good. Chuck's gonna let all of us know about his onion sandwiches.
I'm going to do it.
Since Chucks that I'm going to do it, we've just triggered listener mail.
Oh, by the way, that onion should be a sweet white onion, So a idelia.
Is a great choice.
Only a sweet yellow onion.
It is yellow, but maybe the sweet overrides the color. What you don't want is a red out again.
Okay, I could see that. That's a that's a real harsh yeah.
Yeah, all right, I'm gonna call this reality. We did that episode is reality real and got a lot.
Of great feedback on it.
People seem to enjoy kind of breaking their brains momentarily, Hey, guys, just listen to that episode. Thumbs up for daring to tackle such a subject that one could get really in the weeds about. For example, one could argue that each other is humans, reality is different from one another. The whole idea of perception is reality, and everyone's perception is different than one. Mask must ask what the definition of
reality is? I kind of talked about that a little bit to okay, anyhow, all that aside, one question I was never able to understand why it's even a question. Is if a tree falls in the woods and no one's around to hear it doesn't make a sound. Doesn't science tell us that sound is caused by friction and vibration. That tree would have to pull off one heck of a trick to fall without causing any kind of friction
and vibration. And furthermore, what makes us so important that a tree would put on a friction and vibration show only when we're present? Am I missing something here with this tree sound issue? I've just never understood why that's a question, at least because we are in the presence and know about science. But then again, science also can't seem to talk some out of the flat earth theory either,
which is reality for some love the pod. Keep up the great work, and that is Corey and Omaha, Nebraska.
Thanks a lot, Corey. I guess to kind of answer that a little bit as best I can. I can't even this has been too my brain's broken. Let me just stop for well.
I think you kind of answered it in that episode.
Yeah, I mean, I guess we do. Yeah. It's funny that Corey brings us up because there's something that hit me the other day too. Like when we did the reality episode, I totally understood everything that we were saying.
It all made sense to me.
And then an airplane flew overhead, and I wondered why I was witnessing hearing an airplane fly overhead that I was not expecting. That has nothing to do with my life other than the fact that I can hear it and it's flying overhead. Why would that exist? I don't know. The best thing I can come up with is that it exists for those other people, and they just happen to be passing by the space that I'm occupying at the time, and I'm within earshot, so it happens for me.
I don't know. I can't can't quite connect those dots. So I kind of get what Corey's saying there.
Yeah, I get it too. I I don't like to think about this stuff.
I love it. I'll think about it for both of us. Oh great, Well, if you want to get in touch with this like Corey did and break our brains a little further, we love to hear from you. You can send us an email to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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