The owners of the Randolph restaurant Saap traveled to Chicago in the spring of 2022 to attend the James Beard Awards. The Northern Thai eatery’s chef, Nisachon “Rung” Morgan, was nominated for Best Chef: Northeast by the annual awards honoring the American hospitality industry.
Morgan won. By the time she and her husband, Steve Morgan, returned to central Vermont, their business and their lives had changed.
“We came back from Chicago,” according to Steve Morgan, “and there were 67 messages on my phone.” Most of those messages were for reservations in the 60-seat dining room. Revenue at Saap soared 300% after the restaurant won the award.
The Morgans were and remain ecstatic to have won. But soon after winning, what might qualify as good problems started to settle in.
Saap had to turn away potential customers “right and left,” Morgan said, as diners were suddenly drawn in droves to their prize-winning restaurant. Sometimes, he said, Saap had to stop accepting takeout orders because the dining room was full and the small staff was stretched thin. Morgan said that on a couple of occasions, Saap made the mistake of overbooking the dining room, making customers wait longer than they should have.
“There’s obviously cons to everything,” according to Matthew Peterson, owner of May Day, a restaurant in the Old North End of Burlington whose chef, Avery Buck, is nominated this year in the Best Chef: Northeast category. The restaurant finds out April 2 if it and other Vermont semifinalists advance to the finals, with overall winners announced June 16.
May Day’s previous chef, Mojo Hancy-Davis, was a semifinalist for Best Chef: Northeast two years ago. Despite recognizing there are cons to everything, Peterson sees almost nothing but positives in being a nominee in the most prestigious hospitality award competition in the country.
“Two separate chefs (nominations) in three years feels more like a holistic representation of what we’re doing here,” Peterson said.
The James Beard ‘bump’
Peterson admits he didn’t take full advantage of Hancy-Davis’ nomination in 2023. May Day closed temporarily for previously planned renovations three days after the nod was announced. Any James Beard “bump,” as Peterson called it, passed May Day by.
“I didn’t necessarily know how to leverage that as an owner,” he said.
Months after that nomination, Hancy-Davis bought the Henry Street Deli in Burlington and left to run that business.
“It took the wind out of my sails a little bit,” Peterson said. Soon, though, he soon landed Buck, with whom he had worked at Hen of the Wood, which has restaurants in Burlington and Waterbury and has been nominated for multiple James Beard prizes over the years.
The wind is back in Peterson’s sails now that Buck, like Hancy-Davis, is a James Beard nominee. “It feels very validating to have another chef get that,” he said.
Peterson feels he’s better at leveraging the honor to benefit May Day. After learning of Buck’s nomination, he reached out to Hello Burlington, a website that highlights the city’s restaurants and events. The night a video about May Day went live on that website, Peterson said customers came into his homey North Winooski Avenue eatery saying they had just seen the video.
“There has been a bump for sure,” according to Peterson, who said the nomination that mentions Buck by name is about more than one person. “It just feels like a whole team working together.”
‘A monumental moment’
Christian Kruse felt the bump when he was a semifinalist for Best Chef: Northeast in 2022, the same year Morgan at Saap won. At the time, he was chef at Black Flannel Brewing & Distilling in Essex.
“It certainly was a monumental moment to me,” said Kruse, who left Black Flannel to work at The Big Spruce and Hatchet Tavern in Richmond, which have since closed. “It’s certainly something that I’ve worked hard to try to achieve. It is the Oscars of the hospitality industry. Any chef/owner/whatever that’s been working hard in their field and doing their craft, I think it’s something they want to achieve.”
Kruse is seeking investors to help fund his own restaurant in The Big Spruce location.
“It’s an accolade that really opens the door to have conversations with people,” he said.
An invitation from Kamala Harris
Kruse, Peterson and Morgan all mentioned the same relatively minor negative aspect of being a James Beard Award nominee. It isn’t so much about the impact it has on the restaurant as the impact on the customer.
“People come in with a different expectation once you’ve won a James Beard Award,” according to Morgan. He said some customers think of the awards as honoring only elegant dining rooms with linen on the tables, or French- or Italian-trained chefs unlike his wife who’s cooking elevated versions of Thai food from her homeland.
Once those customers taste the food at Saap, Morgan said, their response is usually something like “Oh, I get it now.” He noted that the year Saap won was when the James Beard Foundation started recognizing more diverse cuisine than it had before; customers had not yet adjusted to that new way of thinking about the nominations.
“The (James Beard) Foundation is broadening the scope of what good food looks like,” according to Peterson of May Day.
Kruse heard comments from Black Flannel customers about a brewpub not being what they expected for such a prestigious nomination. He noted that one of this year’s nominees, Canteen Creemee – which dispenses ice cream and fried chicken from a takeout space in a Waitsfield shopping plaza – isn’t known for impeccable service but for its creative, innovative offerings.
Peterson said his restaurant that aims for “fun, approachable food” has had “self-proclaimed foodies” come in expecting the elegance they might find in Boston or New York.
“We get a lot of that,” Peterson said of “self-proclaimed foodies.” That just encourages him and his staff to rise to the occasion.
“I like high expectations,” Peterson said, especially when the crew at May Day delivers what the customer wants.
A James Beard nomination does set a restaurant up for closer scrutiny, according to Morgan. “It kind of puts a bullseye on your back,” he said.
But the award also set Saap up for opportunities it might not have otherwise had. Just before President Biden left office in January, Morgan said Saap was invited to an Asian-heritage celebration at the home of then-Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington, D.C. Restaurants representing the cuisine of 25 countries served small plates that night, and Morgan said Saap likely would not have been included had it not won a James Beard Award three years ago.
“It’s been quite the crazy ride,” he said.
And the nominees are…
This year’s Vermont semifinalists for the James Beard Award (finalists to be announced April 2):
- Outstanding Restaurateurs: Cara Chigazola-Tobin and Allison Gibson, Honey Road and The Grey Jay, Burlington
- Outstanding Bar: Wolf Tree, White River Junction
- Best Chef, Northeast: Avery Buck, May Day, Burlington; Charlie Menard, Canteen Creemee, Waitsfield
www.jamesbeard.org
Contact Brent Hallenbeck at bhallenbeck@freepressmedia.com.
