Stuff You Should Know - James Beard: Food Legend

Episode Date: July 6, 2023

James Beard is well-known now for the annual awards named in his honor. But he used to be the most famous chef in America, and set the standard for what makes a celebrity chef.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Hey, everyone We want to announce that we have our final three shows of the year on the books, August 12th in Orlando, Florida, September 6th in National Tennessee and winding it up. Right here in Atlanta, September 9th. They're going to be great. Just great, great, great, great. So if you want to come see the Stuff You Should Know Greatness, the last of it for the year, you can by going to StuffYouShouldNo.com and checking out our tour page or going to link tree slash

sysk. Either way you'll get links to tickets and all the info you need. We'll see you starting in August. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHe Heart Radio. 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 eat. That's right. This is about James Beard the human and the James Beard Foundation and awards. Big thanks to Dave Ruse, who helped us put this together. And I also got a lot of stuff from a writer, a bunch of interviews and magazine articles on, this guy John Birdzall, who wrote a book

called The Man Who Eight 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, in the, you know, starting in the early 1900s in the United States. Yeah, one of the things about the internet 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 1997 or 2010 or whatever, anytime before 2021 John Bird's All'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 20th century. Right. Like just 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 we 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 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 an Emmy or whatever. Yeah, because that is generally how it's viewed as the Oscars of food.

Until the Oscars, it stops saying that. Yeah, they did. Apparently the James Beard Awards were broadcast on Food Network in the 90s and They they call it the culinary Oscars, right and the Oscars. Yeah, they're like, please, please don't do that anymore. We're gonna see you Yeah, and we'll get into his early history, but he is or was a Chef in a cookbook writer 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. This is like Alice Waters and Jacques Papand and the legendary chefs of the world. 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 Gary and he would have to get both of his sleeves fully tatted. That's it. Because that's like it's we just finally kind of caught up to his vibe. Totally. He established it. All right, so should we go back to the beginning? Let's

All right, let's go back to Portland, Oregon then and 1903 I can't imagine what Portland could have possibly been like Growing up as a kid in the 1910s and teens, but there's a lot of horses and rugged people probably so in his own memoir he Probably so. In his own memoir, he semi-accurately described his life as very adilic in the sense that from the very beginning he grew up eating great food for a couple of reasons. One or for three reasons, really. One is because where he lived in Oregon near the coast, they had great fresh seafood everywhere, and forest everywhere everywhere so these great wild berries and vegetables Or organic stuff because that's just everything was basically organic pre-mass farming and pesticide right totally and

The other two reasons are that his mom who was an English woman named Elizabeth Beard was who was in uh... english woman they'm Elizabeth beard uh... was uh... very much into good food and like making sure her son ate like really great stuff in the finest things uh... because they had some money in there he was pretty spoiled he was on the child right yeah think so um... and then the other was his uh... who ended up being kind of his godfather because apparently his dad was in a

very good guy uh... which was a cantonese immigrant uh... chef who was the chef of the house name, Jew Lett, 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 Lett was also a master bread maker, and Portland has one of the oldest Chinatowns in the US. So as a young kid, he was being exposed to all kinds of great cuisines thanks to the,

I think, the 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 was a whole G-Wiz 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 do. This is amazing. This is like the space age in the future. Sit down. And then the other, the, the, the, the Juliet influence was to take other cultures, dishes, and Americanize them in certain ways, justapping out ingredients changing the name and i'm just making it that much more approachable um... 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 can go do yeah for sure um... like i said his dad was not a great dude wasn't around that much uh... his, 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, 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 a diamond earing 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 than who he was in real life. He was very good at embellishing anecdotes, or, you know, he realized the value of the back story 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 Reed College, they're in Portland and ended up being asked to leave Reed College basically expelled his freshman year in 1921 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 that Oregon 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 he still had a deep in abiding love for read 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 they've been to the camera on once he got famous and we're like oh he's

he's a very famous reedy and they gave him a uh... honorary degree uh... many years later in 1976. 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, no, it's surprising. Cause he also could have been like, oh, you want me to be a reading now? Sheve it, but he didn't. He was very pleased to have been given, oh, you want me to be a reading now? Shevet. But he didn't. He was very pleased to have been given an honorary degree. So after college, his little state in college, he's like, you know, I don't want to be an actor, maybe an opera singer. My family is 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 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 down low. Like 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,

15 or so years moving around a lot, still trying to work in theater and doing, also getting involved in cooking some. And I think 24, he moved back to Portland, worked as a radio announcer, and again, joined another theater troupe. 27 moved to LA for a little while and actually got a couple of bit parts and Cecil B. Demille movies.

Oh yeah. Very small parts of, you know, kind of this like you were saying. Apparently he could sing and act. It just was, you know, he was right there in the middle. Right. Yeah. But it wasn't like, oh, like he had no talent whatsoever and he was just a rich kid. In 2018, 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 1937. Yeah, and that 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 1930s, 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 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, canopades, or derves, that kind of stuff. So much so that he ended up making it, 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. There were gay bars in New York pre-prohibition, which I didn't even realize. No, I didn't either. But they basically used prohibition once 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 and progressive and conservative.

Like a seesaw. It's interesting because you tend to think of everything just kind of moving forward which would be progressiveness, but it doesn't always. No, it doesn't. He, your term of those cocktail parties in New York where he was making food, he ended up meeting a very key person in his life named James Colum,

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 though these huge parties, and you're great at this, and you can kind of be my live-in catered chef, essentially. And it was uh... as always like a completely platonic thing but he moved in uh... through column he was able to work all these other parties meet all the sort of well-heeled uh... 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 uh... sort of simple or dervish 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 got to make one now. Really? I was not inspired too. Oh man. I think they look delicious. I saw Jacques Papine make one. Maybe I had something to do with it. But you take some brioche 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, a pure and a pinch. And then you spread mayo on each side. You slice very thinly. You cut it onion in half, and then very thinly slice, 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 the 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. It would, 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? Okay. Uh, 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 caviar and truffles, but the food itself apparently and the finger foods and sandwiches are all kind of boring Yeah, 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 Orderve Inc. with a brother and sister, Bill and Irma Road. And at the same time, he learned a lot from these people. He also learned a lot from a woman named Gene Wilson who was a social light 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, 1940, just a few years after he started cooking, I uh... in his his uh... culinary education you could say anyone on the i think nineteen forty just a few years after he started cooking i think right and you see 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 thirty nine okay so in three years he went from

teaching himself out of cook basically hanging out with uh... new york society to writing his first cookbook in uh... nineteen forty which he claimed over it in six weeks yeah uh... shortly thereafter uh... and i guess we'll take a break after this but he was drafted into the army uh... i saw he listed and that he was drafted so i'm not sure which is true but i saw drafted more often uh... then listed 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 42 into 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. Do we take that break?

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this and that. 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 1940 cookbook or Dervs in Canapace, there's no mention of them. There's no mention of any of the order of ink or of their ownership in order of ink, I should say. And he kind of, at least in retrospect, became a little bit famous for, at the very least, to 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 1940 to 1983. He had 20 cookbooks, including in 1959, 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 casulaide, 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 it the time. It was just, you know, the 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. He was six three weight over 300 pounds. He eventually was bald and kind of looked like an uncle fester type. But apparently 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 loved to eat a lot of food. So much so that he had one of the first first cooking shows maybe the first televised cooking show in America in 1946 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 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, 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 he 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 this 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 just little references or a little, the way they said something to kind of as code of like, hey, I'm gay, you like, you see, you see when I'm putting down here. And he would do that apparently on his TV show. And he would drop little hat pins to sort of, to the gay community at least. So they would know that he was gay, but straight people are just like, well, 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, listen right in. But yeah, apparently he was, he was very much like that until that first best selling cookbook, the 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, so enthralled by food in 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. That was kind of how he was presented starting in the late 50s. There is a Instagram guy follow. 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 took-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 up 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. But 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 answer. You're right. I'll be like, all right, there you go, man. There you go, James Peard, do it. So we talked about the fact that he would present, you know, sort of fancy foods in a simpler way for Americans

that may have been intimidated by the classic French cooking and stuff like that. And one good example is in his cookbook from 1949, the Fireside Cookbook, when he basically made what is an omelet peasant, which is a French for peasant omelet, but he called it a country omelet. And all he did was... Is it anything that... Is it 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. 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 cultures 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. 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 cultures' food. It was a huge debt 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 cuisine in the process. Yeah. They make a very good point. Like if you think of the 1960s, what might be on an a recipe book or a menu, you probably aren't,

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 1960s and they say, and he's writing about roasted figs and prosciutto and sun chokes and ceviche and stuff like that, like I didn't know about any of that stuff in the 80s and 90s

even probably. And he was writing about the stuff in the 1950s and 60s. It started to become a thing in the 80s with the Yuppies started to and they can thank James Beard for that. But I'm just thinking of American Psychics. Well, yeah, I'm totally at, what. We'll figure it out. That scene with the business card. It is great. So, yes, but that's exactly what I was thinking of. But you're right. Yes, but before that, there's an example of him in his TV show in 1945 or 2006, talking about

this exotic oil that people should go root out. It's hard to find, but it's worth the effort. And it was called olive oil. And like this was like, this is a time when that was not, you could not find that anywhere, maybe in like literally, but you did not find it like mass produced in your grocery store. It's like you use 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 his influences everywhere still today and not just still today like finally today His influences really kind of come into full fruition Yeah, agreed. I love talking about food I'm hungry. Should we take that second break? Sure.

Let's go get some onion sandwiches. All right, and we'll talk about the James Beard Foundation. And it's legacy right after this. Many stuff with Joshua Charles. Stuff you should go. Everybody, we know there are a ton of people and choose stuff you should go. Hey everybody, we know there are a ton of podcasts out there. Well, we have one we would love for you to check out.

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How to take a birthday poop and all about fractals! Ginkus con! a till of the hunt, the Lizzy Board of murders and again, I've all run, don't explain everything to your brain, explode this shot, and die, this stuff you should know. Oh, no, his foundation. In the 70s, in New York, he bought a townhouse at 167 West 12 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 just a little more private, I guess at that point. He was still writing cookbooks, but he was just a little more private, I guess, at that point. He was free in the 70s in New York, especially in Greenwich Village, to be a little more out. Although he, you know, apparently he was just sort of a homebody with his longtime partner, who was a pastry chef, a Gino Kofachi. And again, throw these great parties, these great holiday meals. In 1981 he started, and this is a big part of his legacy today.

He founded with restaurant critic Gale 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 1981, 50 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, it's apparently Meals on Wheels have been around since the 40s.

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 Reed College. Remember, he'd left the bulk of his state to read.

And I get the impression as one of his students who became a colleague, Peter Kump, 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 1985 and they owned the townhouse by 1986. So then they're like, okay, what do we do next? got owned the townhouse by 1986. So they're like, okay, what do we do next? Yeah, and he, by the way, lived to be 81. So despite his, his size and, and how much kind of rich foods he ate, 81'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 the james beard house still there today and uh... i think their first sort of mission was uh... to quote provider center for the culinary arts and to continue to foster interest uh... the interest james beard inspired in all aspects of food its preparation presentation and of course enjoyment and you know they 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 1987 when Varschenpok who was known it so fun to listen to he is a love hearing that guy talk and at the time back then he was known as Walter Pogowski still. Oh, that is named. Oh, God, I believe every joke you tell me. Oh, no, I'm killing it. Oh, gosh.

I would love to hear an interview or just a conversation between Wolfgang Puck and Furner Herzl. Yeah, totally. That would be the best. It would be a mess. It would be a mess. Hey, can I host the dinner 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 once a month? Have 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.

Um, 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 invite Josh and I and you mean Emily to come. Okay, yeah. But if I'm sitting there like rolling my eyes, don't get mad. Okay. Um, the if I'm sitting there like rolling my eyes don't get mad The onion sandwich, please so this Peter Kump guy. He's like I'm gonna memorialize my my teacher one way or another I mentioned Julia child really. I don't know if we said that she that she and James beer were very good friends

Yeah, and at a time probably 70s 80s, 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, Julie Childs 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's knife, And that's about it at the time for the first few iterations of this award. Yeah, of course, a little recognition for those in the know, but it's not like now where a lot of people now are like, oh, 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 1990, so they just had bought this house in the, like, 80, what do you say, food network and stuff like that. In 1990, so they just had bought this house in the, what, like 80, what do you say, 87?

86. 86, and got things going sort of in the late 80s. And then in 1990, the publisher of the, who's, who of cooking in America said, you know what, we'd like to sell this, this property. And Cump 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, let's expand it, though. And let's not have just chefs, but

let's have food at critics and restaurants and wine, some all yeas and wine people and cookbooks and eventually, know podcast and blogs and let's give awards for all kinds of things uh... and eventually that became the james beard chef and restaurant awards uh... 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 winners so so it became kind of an aura

boros. 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. Whether they achieve that or not, depends on who you ask and what year you asked it but eventually in the early 90s It started to become

At least that you could see the outlines of the prestigious award that it is today Yeah, for sure the first awards in 91 We're held on the MS New Yorker cruise ship dinner cruise ship and in 91 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, and now each have their own region, and then everyone else is split up into like Southeast and Northeast and stuff like that. Flyover states. Exactly.

But that first year, see if you recognize any of these names. The very first year of those awards Southeast winner was Emerald Legassi He's the one who'd be like I guarantee No, I haven't heard he's the BAM guy the Midwest was a chef Rick Bayless Bobby Flay one rising star chef wasn't any married to the actor from law and order? Bobby Flay? The assistant DA for a while. Oh, I don't know. Yeah, maybe that's a yes

Chef Nancy Silverton who is a legend one pastry chef in 91 then won for her restaurant Campanille in 2001 and then one pervached overall chef in 2014. So she's a three-time winner, and if you're wondering who won the best outstanding overall, standing chef that very first year. Hey, look at me! It's a well-filling pack! Very first winner.

Very nice. That's appropriate, because you'll put the james beard house on the map oh and also quickly for you wine lovers uh... robert monday one outstanding wine and spirits professional that very first year and monday is now like you know the wine like right and it's it's hard to to stop and imagine but at the time these were all like unnoten s 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 um restaurants who have been nominated just nominated for a beard award uh says that they they typically double their reservations and they increase their sales by 20 to 25%. Not all though. I saw an interview with a guy named Jason Wilson who had a restaurant called Crush and Seattle back in the mid, I think 2010 or 11. He won.

Best chef. And he said, nope, it did not have that effect. Like people 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. Now I thought you were gonna say, he won in March of 2020.

And just couldn't understand why people weren't backing in. Well, he actually did cite the economic downturn as one reason why it wasn't happening. And he was talking about the, from the 2008 meltdown I was still going I remember that was that lasted easily until 2012 or 13 and he won in 2010 so he had He was just sitting there griping

So we need to talk about the controversies of the beard award-zo because they've had a few things that happened over the years any award ceremony is gonna have few things that happened over the years. Any award 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 2004, they had a chairman named Leonard Pickell, I guess, senior or junior. I don't think it's pronounced pickle. PICK ELL. And he was convicted of grand larceny. I think second-degree grand larceny for

basically stealing about a million dollars in cash or Basically stealing about a million dollars in cash or You know, expensive things you shouldn't expense over a three-year period like those are the foundations money And they have a lot of you know scholarships that they dole out to so that's you know That's a big deal if you're stealing from them. He's been 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 Bat Batali 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.

Yeah. Either literal sexual assault, assaulters or they're just, you 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. Yeah, you're right. 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 like be berated at work every single night. It's not okay. And so people finally push 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 award after award 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 gonna 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 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, 10 or 15 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 2018, 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 2020

when they canceled the James Beard Awards, not just for 2020, but for 2021. 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? And apparently an insider in the foundation

who is also like either a chefer, journalist, or whatever came and told everybody else, that's not why they cancel the awards. They cancel the awards because every single person who won this year In reality is 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 that And this was after trying to do the right thing and uh... and this is after trying to do the right thing and

uh... they cancel like you said the next one just because they were still sort of reeling from uh... what had happened in or the cancel them sorry in twenty twenty one because they were still reeling from twenty twenty uh... finally came back last year in twenty twenty two with the first awards uh... and i guess three years and they had a total overhaul

of the committee and how they judge uh... they're saying that you know there's an ethics committee now that vets nominees just on a personal level and then uh... also said and the way we're judging like we need to think about um... the criteria in different terms as well moving forward yeah they still don't have it figured out, because this ethics committee 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 grilled over Zoom, or probably in person now, by private investigators working on behalf of the James Beard Ethics Committee. And that's 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 him 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 uh... made the news uh... one was that uh... finalist for best chef in the south and alabama chef named him to me uh... haunts us was disqualified a month before the awards because they were like he's one of these guys that berates a staff

even yelts at customers uh... he denied this stuff said that's not true well it's not like he was like hey listen up a a passionate guy denied this stuff said that's not true well i think he was like a listen up a passionate guy but this stuff is not how it's being characterized uh... but one of the real problems is they didn't communicate that to the committee members that they had disqualified it like they found about that out about it in the press

uh... and a lot of other chefs and judges uh... because i think there's like six hundred ultimate judges that like 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 for was a finalist for best chef South East. And she said that she was questioned, like given basically no notice, questioned over zoom 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 tipsters 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 way too much secrecy around how it goes down these investigations. They don't have a real true day in court for the accused. It's just they're kind of just almost surprised, it seems like. And 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. Sounds Kafka-esque.

Yeah, Bourdain has always been very critical. He was, he had a lot of bad stuff to say about the beard awards over the years. Time's 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 guy. He's kind of like the people who've 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 Always remember a tweet from him at the right when baby driver came out and everybody was crazy for it All it said was f baby driver came out and everybody was crazy for it. All it said was F baby driver, but he didn't say F and it was just three words that completely undermined everybody else. It was really kind of masterful. We're doing love that guy. So yeah, one thing though, Chuck to wrap this all up, to me James Beard is still such an ending bun. Confusing, I have no idea what he would make of 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 knows? Who knows, not, or maybe he would. Yeah, we don't know. If you wanna 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 going to let all of us know about his onion sandwiches.

I'm going to do it. And since Chuck's it, 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 Vidalia is a great choice. Isn't a Vidalia sweet yellow onion? It is yellow, but maybe the sweet overrides the color. Sure. What you don't want is a red onion.

Okay, I can see that. That's a real, that's a heart. That's a heart. Yeah. Alright, I'm going to call this reality. We did that episode as reality real. We 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's human's reality is different from one another. The whole idea of perception is reality, and everyone's perception is different. Then one must ask what the definition of reality is. I think we can kind of talk about that a little bit today.

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 here, it doesn't make a sound. It 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 by this 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 there. Well, I think you kind of answered it in that episode. Yeah, I mean, I guess we did. 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 quite connect those dots. So I kind of get what Corey's saying there. Yeah, I get it too. I just, 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 us like Corey did and break our brains a little further, we'd love to hear from you. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast. at iHeartpodcast.com.

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