Connect with us

San Francisco, CA

Here’s Everything the Bay Area Won at the 2025 James Beard Awards

Published

on

Here’s Everything the Bay Area Won at the 2025 James Beard Awards


The James Beard Foundation (JBF) Awards took over Chicago on Monday, June 16. Restaurants and cooks across the country flocked to the Windy City to crown the new royalty of the food world. This year, the San Francisco Bay Area cleaned up, at least in respect to last year’s showing. That is, Northern California punched well above its weight in the media categories, which were announced in a ceremony on Saturday, June 14.

Sadly there were zero restaurant and chef finalists that made the jump onto Monday night’s podium. Chefs Stuart Brioza and Nicole Krasinski of The Anchovy Bar, The Progress, and State Bird Provisions were snubbed, one of many New York restaurants taking the win instead. Jacob Brown did not take home the gold on behalf of the Mission’s Lazy Bear in the Outstanding Professional in Beverage Service category. Neither Richard Lee of Saison nor Kosuke Tada of Mijoté took home the Best Chef: California award. The final nominee Harbor House Inn lost in the Outstanding Hospitality category, too.

Still, the San Francisco Chronicle’s new-ish food critic Mackenzie Chung Fegan won the JBF’s Emerging Voice award. Fegan is a San Francisco-grown writer whose family owns local mainstay Henry’s Hunan. Most recently, her writing caused a stir for describing the now-infamous Kellergate wherein Thomas Keller pulled her aside at his French Laundry restaurant to lecture her on his qualms with today’s food media.

Preeti Mistry won the Audio Programming award for their podcast Loading Dock Talks. Mistry’s restaurant Juhu Beach Club was an Oakland smash hit before closing, landing the chef on an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown in 2015. Their weekly conversation-style podcast features Bay Area chefs and cooks discussing their recipes, politics, and more. “One of the goals of empire is to dehumanize certain groups of people,” Mistry said while accepting their award. “That means trans folks. That means Palestinians. That means undocumented immigrants. Storytelling and oral history is such a part of humanizing people.”

Advertisement

Wine country restaurant hero Rogelio Garcia took home a win in the “Professional and Restaurant” category for the JBF’s Book Awards. His debut cookbook Convivir: Modern Mexican Cuisine in California’s Wine Country, crowns his ascent through Northern California restaurants, including the now-closed SoMa restaurant Luce and his current job at Michelin star-holding Auro in Calistoga.

Since 1991, the James Beard Awards — the “Oscars of food” — have remained one of the Big Deals in the food industry. The foundation canceled its programming in 2020 and 2021 after allegations of misbehavior and abuse toward nominees, in addition to a dearth of nominated and winning Black chefs in 2020. In 2022, the organization reorganized after internal audits. Unsurprisingly, given how food moves across the planet, the James Beard Awards’ speeches this year skewed toward rejecting the anti-immigrant sentiment spreading throughout the United States.

Disclosure: Some Vox Media staff members are part of the voting body for the James Beard Awards. Eater is partnering with the James Beard Foundation to livestream the awards in 2025. All editorial content is produced independently of the James Beard Foundation.



Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

San Francisco, CA

Video: Mountain Lion Spotted in San Francisco

Published

on

Video: Mountain Lion Spotted in San Francisco


new video loaded: Mountain Lion Spotted in San Francisco

transcript

transcript

Advertisement

Mountain Lion Spotted in San Francisco

Residents were shocked to see a young mountain lion roaming the streets of San Francisco this week. Local animal control agencies were able to capture and tranquilize it on Tuesday.

Swear to God, am I tripping? There’s a mountain lion. What is that? I can see it. Oh my God. What the. Dude!

Residents were shocked to see a young mountain lion roaming the streets of San Francisco this week. Local animal control agencies were able to capture and tranquilize it on Tuesday.

By Cynthia Silva

January 27, 2026



Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

San Francisco, CA

Animal control locates mountain lion in San Francisco

Published

on

Animal control locates mountain lion in San Francisco


A young mountain lion that was spotted Monday night in San Francisco’s Pacific Heights neighborhood has been located, city officials said.

Around 6:20 a.m. Tuesday, city officials said San Francisco Animal Care and Control found the mountain lion and that they are working with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to manage the situation. No injuries were reported.

A biologist is on their way to the scene, with the plan to tranquilize the animal and move it to a suitable location, officials said.

The mountain lion was first reported Monday night after being seen near Octavia Street and Pacific Avenue, according to an alert from the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management.

Advertisement

Animal Care and Control officials said experts believe the animal is about a year old. It had also been seen earlier Monday morning near Lafayette Park, just a few blocks from the later sighting.

City officials said the mountain lion was likely lost and may have been trying to move south out of the city.



Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

San Francisco, CA

San Francisco Unified educators nearing final days for vote on whether to strike

Published

on

San Francisco Unified educators nearing final days for vote on whether to strike


After months of back and forth between educators and the San Francisco school district, Georgie Gibbs is ready to strike. 

“But every year we have to figure out what staffing we’re going to have at our school, and every year there’s less money to staff our site, and that’s hard,” Gibbs said.

Gibbs is an elementary school teacher and a member of the United Educators of San Francisco, a union for school staff. Since March, they’ve requested higher wages, stable health insurance, and more support for special education teachers.

“At our site, we have special day classes which are self-contained, special education classrooms, and those, one of our classrooms has not had a full-time teacher for a whole entire year in three years,” Gibbs said.  

Advertisement

In their latest offer in January, the district proposed the following three-year stabilization plan.

The district proposed a path to fully funded family health benefits, a 6 percent raise over three years, along with addressing staffing shortages for special education. The union rejected it.

  • Identifying a fiscal pathway for the District to fully fund family health benefits
  • 6% raise over three years (2% each year for next three years)
  • Salary rate augmentations for hard-to-staff special education paraeducators
  • Solutions to address special education workload with a focused pilot program

Union president Cassandra Curiel says members are casting their final round of votes for a strike. 

“The district hasn’t changed their position since May of 2025. That is an untenable condition for us to be in,” Curiel said. 
If both groups don’t come to an agreement, the union’s more than 6,000 members will strike for the first time in nearly 50 years. 

“Being in our schools is the place we want to be, but working for San Francisco Unified can be complicated at best,” Curiel said. 

Officials say the district is planning for more budget cuts in the next school year, which plays a role in negotiations.

Advertisement

A spokesperson for the district wrote:

“We know many of you are closely following the ongoing negotiations between our district and United Educators of San Francisco (UESF). 

We are disappointed to share that we did not reach an agreement with UESF after today’s fact-finding session (part of the formal bargaining process). SFUSD remains committed to negotiating in good faith with our labor partners and to reaching an agreement that honors our educators while also balancing the need to be fiscally responsible.

Our goal is to have a stable district. We want to reach an agreement that supports our valued educators. However, we must also be able to afford the agreement long-term so that we can continue serving students now and in the future.”

Havah Kelley told CBS News Bay Area that her son, who has a learning disability, was transferred outside of the district because there aren’t enough special needs teachers. 

“Especially since COVID, the high teacher turnover, the shortages, and just a myriad of other reasons, he was not getting the services that he needed,” Kelley said. 

Advertisement

That experience makes her feel a strike is necessary, but she knows there would be real-life consequences.

“It would be ideal if we could avoid a strike. That’s a definite, and I’m not going to say otherwise,” Kelly said. “Any type of disruption, for our kids, we have almost immediate regression.” 

Union members are holding their final vote to authorize a strike. If the majority votes yes, it is likely SFUSD educators will strike for the first time since 1979. The last day to vote is Jan. 28.



Source link

Continue Reading
Advertisement

Trending