I am deeply honored to have just won the world’s top food critic prize at the international 2010 Le Cordon Bleu World Food Media Awards.
The only global contest of its kind, the biennial World Food Media Awards honor food and drink journalists around the world in 24 categories covering cookbooks, magazines, newspapers, television, digital media and photography. The awards bring together journalists, authors and television hosts from more than two dozen countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Canada, Belgium, France, Slovenia, Spain, Singapore, South Africa and New Zealand. This is my third nomination and first win for restaurant reviews. The World Food Media Awards were founded in 1990 in Adelaide, Western Australia, several years before the James Beard Foundation launched its own domestic media awards.
According to awards jury chairman Ian Parmenter at the ceremony tonight in Adelaide: “The standard of entries in this year’s competition was extraordinarily high, and the international judges were faced with an enormous task — but the judges were consistent in their agreement on the winners.”
The World Food Media Awards were substantially funded for 20 years by a grant for the arts from the Australian government. Sadly, the government eliminated arts funding during austerity measures in 2011, forcing the awards to shut down. While various American critics were nominated over the years, the only other critic from the United States to win the award for restaurant criticism was Caroline Bates of Gourmet magazine.)
