The James Beard Foundation is shaking up its restaurant award regions, carving the country into new territories to better reflect shifts in population and dining.
The changes, which the national culinary organization planned to announce on Tuesday, reflect growth in the number of restaurants outside traditional food powerhouses like New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco that meet the foundation’s standards, said Mitchell Davis, its chief strategy officer.
The group will now give out awards in 12 regions instead of 10, allowing it to add 40 new restaurants, bars and chefs to a lengthy list of semifinalists that has already topped 400. A committee of 20 food writers, editors and producers is charged with sifting through thousands of recommendations from regional judges, industry professionals and the public to create the semifinal list.
“It’s more reactive to the reality of what the country is right now,” Mr. Davis said. “At one time in America, there weren’t 40 restaurants you wanted to shine the light on.”
California, Texas and New York will be separated from nearby states and become stand-alone regions. The idea, Mr. Davis said, is to treat those states as culturally distinct districts. The move also improves the odds for restaurants and chefs in states that have been overshadowed, he said.
New York City, which has been its own region since the awards began in 1991, will become part of the New York State region. Previously, all parts of the state outside the city were in the Northeast region, which included the six New England states.
Mr. Davis said the changes were prompted by data that show new competition and better restaurants in some metropolitan centers, most notably in Texas. That state had been part of the Southwest region, which included Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Oklahoma.
“Austin gets to fight with Dallas, which couldn’t be more different than Houston, and all of that makes a dynamic, meaningful region,” he said.
Although the foundation’s inner workings don’t mean much to people who take notice only in May, when the winners are announced, the restaurant industry follows the nominations with all the passion of members in a fantasy-football league.
The organization is bracing for complaints from chefs who think their states, too, should be stand-alone regions. It has already heard rumblings from the Great Lakes region, which takes in a huge swath: Illinois, Michigan, Ohio and Indiana.
“Some places in that category might feel overshadowed by Chicago, but if we make Illinois its own region, then it’s just Chicago competing against Chicago,” Mr. Davis said. “A collection of great restaurants can’t be the reason to create a region. There has to be some meaningful competition.”
In other changes, some states in the former West and Northwest regions will be combined into a new Northwest and Pacific region made up of Alaska, Washington, Oregon and Hawaii. The remaining states from the former Northwest region — Idaho, Montana and Wyoming — will join Colorado and Utah in the new Mountain region.
The Southwest region will now include Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Oklahoma. (Nevada had been in the West region.)
The changes are driven in part by hard numbers, but also by a desire to create a certain cultural cohesiveness, which Mr. Davis said is harder to measure. “We are not Italy and we are not China, which are filled with distinct culinary styles and regions,” Mr. Davis said.
Last year, the foundation made a seismic shift by creating a new set of criteria for judges, asking them to consider a restaurant’s values — whether it promoted diversity, sustainability, equality, respect and transparency.
The result, in May, was a list of nominees and winners that looked radically different. A record number of women chefs were honored, and for the first time, barbecue restaurants, noodle shops and fancier restaurants with a global outlook were contenders in what had been largely a sea of expensive Eurocentric restaurants.
And in a nod to the #MeToo movement, some notable chefs and restaurants were left off the list in 2018, including the Hearth & Hound, a new Los Angeles restaurant from the chef April Bloomfield and her partner, Ken Friedman. A New York Times report in 2017 cited several women who said Mr. Friedman had sexually harassed them and allowed such harassment to flourish at the partners’ Spotted Pig restaurant in New York. The Hearth & Hound has since closed.
The foundation is doing more fact-checking when it receives reports about the behavior of chefs at restaurants under consideration, said Bill Addison, the Los Angeles Times restaurant critic, who heads the foundation’s restaurant-and-chef subcommittee. Similarly, judges who supply names to the panel will continue to be encouraged to follow the 2018 guidelines, he said.
“We hope that the judges consider restaurants they put forth holistically, and that includes more than just the food and atmosphere,” Mr. Addison said.
The foundation may adjust the list of regions in the coming years, he added. “This process is an evolution. If it needs correction, then we’ll make corrections.”
