When the once-respectable James Beard Foundation went woke a few years ago, it switched its main focus from celebrating great American cuisine to “equity,” “diversity” — and punishing chefs who sometimes in the heat of kitchen battle yell at people. But it cooked its own goose with a Gestapo-like intimidation of a hard-working, Lexington, Ky., chef whose pop-up eatery Tuk Tuk serves cuisine she learned from her Sri Lanka-born parents.
Unfortunate Sam Fore, the New York Times reported this week, received a scary phone call “from a private investigator working for the James Beard Foundation.” Next, two men peppered her in a half-hour Zoom “interrogation” (as she called it) about a couple of her social media posts. None was the least offensive to anybody, which didn’t stop an anonymous tipster (a disgruntled former employee, perhaps?) from calling them out to the foundation.
The foundation later informed Fore that it wouldn’t revoke her nomination because — don’t choke on the syntax here — its investigation “did not find it more likely than not that you violated the [foundation’s] Code of Ethics.”
But the article splashed big-time egg on the foundation’s face on the eve of its annual awards for chefs and restaurants — once called the “Oscars of the food world” — being held on June 5. (Fore is a candidate in the Best Chef: Southeast category.)
As the Times noted, Fore was ironically the “kind of chef the retooled awards are meant to recognize more fully,” i.e., one who is neither male nor of European descent.
She actually fared better than Timothy Hontzas of Johnny’s Restaurant in Homewood, Alabama, another Beard award nominee. As first reported by Alabama site AL.com and later in the Washington Post, Hontzas was disqualified for violating Beard’s “code of ethics.” His sin — which an “independent investigation” corroborated — was that he once yelled at an employee.
You couldn’t make it up.
It’s questionable whether any of Beard’s powers-that-be ever worked in a restaurant — or have eaten in one. But Beard’s warped priorities are of a piece with the wider wokenization of American institutions by the loony left — from universities that promote Marxist dogma to banks that play footsie with the extremist environmental fringe.
The food-world establishment’s new agenda is a buffet of “progressive” grievances with scant regard to whether dishes taste any good. But Beard has been in a singular tailspin ever since 2018 when it named as its new chief executive, Clare Reichenbach, who admitted at the time to having no culinary background. This at an organization devoted to the heritage of American cuisine. Oh, by the way, Reichenbach is British!
Much of the New York Times’ own culinary coverage is ideologically debased as well. A recent article in the paper probably wrecked the career of renowned Boston chef Barbara Lynch, who had the bad habits of drinking too much and shouting at kitchen staff.
Crybaby restaurant workers today are apparently incapable of dealing with harsh criticism from tyrannical bosses — an experience that surely has never been suffered by any employee in any kind of job anywhere.
No one who consults Eater.com for breathless restaurant news such as “Sandwich Shop Known for Elk Meat Reopens as a High-End Wine Bar” or that a cafe’s cold noodles “ originated in Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea,” can miss the site’s colonization by young, “progressive”-minded editors and writers with their own left-of-Lenin takes.
Eater recently laid off its best writer, critic Ryan Sutton, as part of a cost-cutting purge. But the axe should have fallen on intermittent attention the site pays to “cultural appropriation,” rapacious landlords, unionization battles, managers who steal tips, pay “equity” — and, of course, nasty chefs.
Ever since Eater bravely exposed the actual mistreatment of women employees by Mario Batali in 2017 — when he was a prince of the New York culinary world — it’s been on the prowl for more transgressors. “How to Send Anonymous Information to Eater” has been part of the site since November 2017, although the dragnet so far has yet to reel in another big name.
The worst thing about the Beard Foundation’s persecution of allegedly evil chefs is that it empowers lawyers who make fortunes suing restaurants on the basis of an aggrieved worker’s say-so. Two Manhattan owner-friends of mine beat back the jihad when they produced kitchen videotapes to refute the charges before they went to court — and warned the legal-weasels to back off.
Not every place has the ability to protect the unjustly-accused — which leaves them vulnerable to the next “interrogation.” But it’s time to stand up to the inquisitors before they scare chefs out of their kitchens for good.
