Oh, what a night!  The 2011 James Beard Awards took place last night at Lincoln Center, and I gotta say, it was quite a show. Throngs of bejeweled, besequined, betuxedoed food luminaries packed into Avery Fisher Hall to hear who would take home a JBF medal on a neon-yellow ribbon. I’m happy to report that a few Fine Cooking contributors were part of the lucky bunch (and I was lucky to be there to watch it all go down!). 

Gabrielle Hamilton took home the Best Chef, NYC award for her restauraunt, Prune; James Peterson won the Best Single Subject book award for his newest: Meat: A Kitchen Education; Robb Walsh was awarded the Food Culture and Travel journalism award for “The Southerner’s Guide to Oysters,” which appeared in Garden & Gun magazine; Andrea Reusing won Best Chef: Southeast for her Chapel Hill, NC restaurant, Lantern. Congrats to them all!

Chefs prepare the jamon iberico-caviar “tacos.”		Suvir Saran and Rose Levy Berenbaum		Lobster carpaccio

I also got to see a few other FC friends, including our beloved Suvir Saran, Rose Levy Berenbaum, Suzanne Goin, Rick Bayless, Dan Barber, Tom Douglas, Farmer Lee Jones, and Yasmin Lozada-Hissom, among many, many others.

And did I mention the food? Oh, the food… there were “tacos” made from paper-thin slices of jamon iberico with a dollop of American caviar in the center (that’s my kind of taco!); smoked sea scallops with pickled fava beans; braised, seared lamb belly with jalapeno vinegar (so good!); Thai beef tartare; Texas corn sorbet with sea urchin and yuzu (very strange, but it worked); lobster carpaccio with more caviar; king salmon sushi; rib-eyes with lobster creamed corn and sauce Diane… it was a feast of small bites from around the world.

Can’t wait ’til next year!

Monday’s post: Find out what strange foods our Beard nominees have eaten
Tuesday’s post: Find out what our nominees ALWAYS have on hand in their kitchens
Wednesday’s post: You’ll be surprised to learn about their guilty food pleasures (these pros are just like us!)
Thursday’s post: Our contributors are eating pretty well these days, Find out what they last ate for dinner
Friday’s post: Learn what our all-stars considered their non-food-related dream jobs