Not sure if you guys heard, but this year City of Ate picked up a nomination from the James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards for Group Food Blog, and I was nominated in the Humor category for a feature story we did on fried hamsters. Awesome! We City of Aters were so excited, we got hammered about it and fried up a big batch of hamsters! (Oh, stop whining, prissy pants. They only squeal for a second when you drop them in the hot oil.)
Super drunk and rodent-bloated, I vowed to attend the awards ceremony, which was held last Friday night in New York. I went in hopes that I might get the chance to hear Eric Ripert say, "How does anyone pee in Spanx?" or to at least lick Tom Colicchio's fivehead.
In reality, visiting New York was great, but the felt-like-a-sad-prom-for-foodies event was a bummer (and yes, I'm just bitchy because we lost). Here's my list of six letdowns from the James Beard Book, Broadcast & Journalism Awards:
1. Where's my effing foie gras? Just outside the fancy doors of L'Espace, where the awards banquet was held, the lovely folks from PETA greeted me by calling me "pretentious" (clearly they know me) and handing me a pamphlet with a picture of an angry goose on it. I was like, "Sweet! We get foie gras??" Then, I got inside and saw that the menu just offered us banana leaf-wrapped salmon. Great.
2. Gail Simmons' boobs. They weren't out. They had completely closed up shop for the night. Seriously?? Why are we even here?
3. No Padma Lakshmi or Tom Colicchio. If they were there, I couldn't see them from way in the back at table 35. But James Oseland and Dana Cowin were. Boo.
4. You call this SWAG? The coolest thing in the SWAG bag was a hardcover book about the history of certified Angus beef. Spoiler alert: It's boring as fuck.
5. No beards. I saw zero beards at this thing. Maybe it was the dim lighting.
6. We lost! Lame! Sure, it was an honor just to be nominated, but dangit, it was sad that we lost. We didn't get to thank Jesus and our moms for helping us write stuff, we didn't get a bronze medal with an old dude's face on it and saddest of all, we didn't get to motorboat Gail on stage.
Grub Street took the award for Best Group Food Blog and @RuthBourdain won the Humor category at the 2011 James Beard Book, Broadcast & Journalism Awards. For a complete list of winners, check out HuffPo's list here.
Tonight, the black-tie awards ceremony co-hosted by Tom Colicchio, Traci Des Jardins and Ming Tsai will be held in NYC. There, they'll announce the much cooler awards, including Best New Restaurant and Rising Star Chef of the Year.
