As the James Beard Awards approach, we’re chatting with a few of our local nominees this week to see how they’re feeling about the competition, their chances, and their upcoming trips to New York.
The San Francisco Chronicle has been nominated for two awards: Best Food Section, and wine writer Jon Bonne, in particular, for Wine and Spirits Writing. Today we got on the phone with the Chronicle’s food critic and section editor Michael Bauer to talk about both of those nominations.
Where are you most excited to eat when you are in New York?
I love going to Scarpetta. I love Corton. Probably those two. I always like going to Balthazar, because I love the feel of the place. I really like the enoteca at Del Posto. I think it’s one of the best values.
Who do you think is your biggest competition in each of your Beard categories?
That’s hard to say. I never can second-guess those things. I know we’ve won [for the food section] three of the last four years, but for some reason they didn’t do it last year…
We’re just all very different sections. I like what the Washington Post is doing, and I like the Chicago Tribune. I think it’s more of a traditional food section, of all of them. You know, it just depends on what the judges decide they like.
Who do you like for Best Chef: Pacific?
I think that’s one of the most interesting lineups of all of the awards… To me there’s really no clear winner. I can usually go through and predict pretty much who’s going to win. On this one, it really is a toss-up. I could give reasons why each might win.
If you win, how are you going to celebrate?
I don’t know. Usually what we’ve done is, in the past—the best section award really is a staff award—so generally we’ve had a party. One time when we won the publisher did kind of a reception for us at Town Hall. Another time we did a dinner at Foreign Cinema.
How will having a Beard award affect your section and your career and the future of the section?
You know, I’m not sure it will have any effect other than to validate what we’ve been doing. I think doing so well in these type of awards has helped us overall. As the newspaper’s been downsized, I think they see us as being valuable, and san Francisco being such a big food town, I think they see the value in what we do. (“They” being the Chronicle’s editors and management.) We still have our huge wine cellar and our test kitchen and our herb garden on the roof… It is very labor intensive to test all the recipes and to do what we do.
