James Beard Award is ‘massive game-changer’ for Twin Cities area restaurants

Less than 24 hours after accepting the James Beard Award for Best Chef: Midwest, Karyn Tomlinson, chef-owner of St. Paul’s Myriel, walked through Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport with her new medal affixed to a white satin ribbon around her neck.

Swiping her phone off airplane mode, she discovered a startling number of new reservations. The 38-seat restaurant had booked 327 guests, selling out for the next month and a half.

For budding TV stars, there’s the Colbert Bump. For authors, it’s the Oprah Bump. In the restaurant world? Call it the Beard Bump.

The James Beard Awards, often likened to the Oscars of the food industry, recognize chefs and restaurateurs in national and regional categories. And the honors, handed out in Chicago each June, can have a transformative effect, not unlike the movie-star-making statuette.

After a win, restaurant books overflow, and dining rooms fill with both local and out-of-town guests. Calls pour in from food-world acquaintances and chefs eager to collaborate. For many winners, the award raises their profile and opens doors to significant career opportunities.

Andrew Zimmern, the Minnesota-based chef and media personality, has presented at the James Beard Awards for more than 20 years and co-hosted this year’s ceremony. He’s seen firsthand the opportunities that come with the accolades.

“It’s a staggering amount of earned media that will come their way,” Zimmern said, pointing to high-profile food events, collaborations and product partnerships. “People are picking up the phone and calling you — and that’s a massive game-changer.”

Sean Sherman experienced the bump in 2022 when his groundbreaking Indigenous restaurant Owamni won Minnesota’s first national-level Beard award for Best New Restaurant. Owamni had already attracted considerable media before opening, and Sherman was a Beard veteran, having won in 2018 for his cookbook “The Sioux Chef,” and a 2019 leadership award. Still, the restaurant award turned Owamni, and Sherman, into globally known names.

“My work was never about becoming a celebrity chef, but having three James Beard Awards definitely plays a role in that,” he said.

Four years after opening, Owamni remains fully booked almost every night, and Sherman finds himself recognized more and more in unexpected places, from Paris subways to South American streets. “It does resonate pretty large out there,” he said.

Christina Nguyen, who won Best Chef: Midwest in 2024 for her seven-year-old restaurant Hai Hai, considered her next steps even as she accepted congratulations from food-world stars and mentors. There were selfies with celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson, who ran Aquavit in Minneapolis in the late 1990s, and quiet thanks for her prep chef back home, who stocked extra food in anticipation of her win.

“We did 700 covers after that,” Nguyen said. The northeast Minneapolis restaurant known for its vibrant bar and patio was already bustling most summer nights, but the post-Beard rush tested the staff. She assured them they’d get through it, calling it “the post-Beard crazies.”

A year later, “things have normalized a bit,” but Nguyen still sees new faces and diners from other cities coming specifically to sample a James Beard Award-winning chef’s cooking. She noted that the Twin Cities now boasts enough Beard winners to build a full itinerary.

Awards like these bolster Minnesota’s reputation as more than flyover country, said Zimmern, a four-time Beard winner for his work in television. “It has a halo effect. People will want to come here and experience those restaurants and other restaurants in our community,” he said.

The recognition also gives winners a platform to talk about the issues that drive them. “These chefs have been at the intersection of so many important issues, so they can talk about healthcare or immigration or wage equity or micro-economies in small towns and other issues that are really important to them,” Zimmern added.

That’s been true for Sherman, who has used Owamni as a test case for other cities to open restaurants that partner with Indigenous food producers.

“We’ve been trying to learn how to harness [the attention] and talk about the work we’re trying to do, which is to raise awareness around Indigenous foods and showcase a lot of the hardships that Indigenous peoples have gone through in history,” Sherman said.

Bûcheron, the Minneapolis restaurant that won this year’s national Best New Restaurant award, is still adjusting to its newfound acclaim.

The 38-seat Minneapolis restaurant, whose name means “lumberjack” in French, is booked solid for the next month, including the earliest and latest seatings, which can be challenging to fill.

“All I have ever asked for is a busy restaurant, a full restaurant. That’s all you can ever dream of when you do this,” said Jeanie Janas Ritter, Bûcheron‘s co-owner. “We have done well from the beginning, but we haven’t always been full. This has been a whole new level of really maxing out the space.”

Joy Summers and Nancy Ngo of the Minnesota Star Tribune contributed to this story.