Why Fine Dining Made a Comeback at This Year’s Oscars of the Food World

On Monday night, dressed in light-wash, head-to-toe denim and a Gucci tee, Nando Chang earned the 2025 James Beard Award for Best Chef: South. The ceremony, held at the Lyric Opera in Chicago, is a black-tie affair, and Chang’s Canadian tuxedo and acceptance speech embodied a general mood of defiance at the annual Oscars of the American restaurant scene. “All food is immigrant, and immigrants make America great. You don’t have to tell us,” said Chang, chef of Itamae AO in Miami, to roaring applause. 

At various points in the night, winners held up flags from Puerto Rico and Peru on stage; they wove Spanish and Korean into their speeches. Host Andrew Zimmern broke from his teleprompter script to decry the inhumanity of ICE raids. The independent restaurant community’s full-throated support of immigrants—beloved colleagues who are essential to its existence—was refreshing but no surprise. Since 2020, the James Beard Foundation has worked to expand its community and notion of excellence, and the awards are no longer a white-washed, boys-club affair. 

But Chang’s win also telegraphed a quiet, unexpected triumph of fine dining at this year’s awards. A few weeks ago, before the who’s who of American chefs descended upon Chicago, I wondered just how relevant fine dining would be at the awards, now in its 35th year. If World’s 50 Best celebrates unbridled, global luxury, and at a time when Michelin’s stars and codified standards are infiltrating every corner of the country (for a price, bien sur), the James Beard Awards defines the pulse and heart of American cooking.

In the spring, when the foundation released its sprawling semifinalist list of 530 restaurants, bars, and bakeries, fine-dining restaurants made up just 12 percent of candidates. Their odds got better with official nominations; 34 fine-dining restaurants made the cut, accounting for a quarter of finalists.

Admittedly, when analyzing the numbers, I found myself struggling to define restaurants at the squishy borderlands of fine dining: casual restaurants with tasting menus, white tablecloth spots without a sense of place, expensive meals served in raucous dining rooms, precisely calibrated cooking with relaxed service.

A three-course meal for two at neo-bistro Le Veau d’Or easily tops $700. (Order a martini. Don’t leave without eating offal! You’re welcome.) But Owners Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr, who won Outstanding Restaurateur this year, aren’t purveyors of fine dining they say. It’s about applying a similar attention to detail without the formality of four-star service. It’s a generational shift that Hanson and Nasr helped lead with Frenchette, Le Rock, and, now, Le Veau d’Or. “Maybe it should be defined more as you’re having a fine time,” Nasr said.

And there were plenty of big, deserved wins for casual restaurants. Emerging Chef went to Phila Lorn, chef of Mawn, a “no rules” Cambodian noodle restaurant in Philadelphia. After Semma earned the number one spot on The New York Times top 100 restaurants last week, Vijay Kumar continued his victory tour by taking home Best Chef: New York State. His soulful, no-holds-barred Tamil cooking edged out omakase-style Yakitori Kono and Ichimura.

But at the end of the Monday night, more than 40 percent of winners hailed from the rarified world of high-end restaurants. After waiting in the wings as a nominee for more than a decade, Cindy Wolf’s white-tablecloth restaurant Charleston finally took home an award for Outstanding Wine and Other Beverages Program. Noah Sandoval’s Michelin two-star Oriole won Best Chef: Great Lakes. Ellia and Junghyun Park traveled to the Chicago awards en route to World’s 50 Best in Turin, and their Atomix earned Best Hospitality. Jungsik Yim, Park’s mentor and chef of New York City’s original Korean fine-dining restaurant, earned the evening’s penultimate award of Outstanding Chef. (Do you still remember your first bite of his kimbap at Jungsik? I do.)

That kind of fine-dining lineage suffused itself into the subtext of the 2025 awards. In his acceptance speech, Bobby Stuckey, whose Frasca Food & Wine won Outstanding Restaurant, talked about leaving the French Laundry to open his Boulder Restaurant. Carlos Delgado learned from José Andrés the fine-dining potential of Peruvian cooking, and his restaurant Causa (and its money-making sister Amazonia) earned him Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic. Even this year’s Best Bar winner has an haute pedigree. Kumiko’s owner Julia Momose led bar programs at Grant Achatz’s the Aviary and Sandoval’s Oriole.

Fine dining’s influence on the awards is even greater if you consider the biographies of casual winners like Bûcheron (Best New Restaurant) in Minneapolis. The French-American spot has a bar menu and bills itself as an “elevated neighborhood restaurant,” but its chefs trained with Gavin Kaysen who trained with Daniel Boulud who won his first James Beard Award at Le Cirque in 1992. Thomas Bille (Best Chef: Texas) has ties to the Thomas Keller family tree via Timothy Hollingsworth at Otium; the Houston chef and owner Belly of the Beast also put in time at the Ritz-Carlton. Arjav Ezekiel, co-owner of Birdie’s in Austin and winner of Outstanding Professional in Beverage Service, was once a service manager at Gramercy Tavern.

Chang, however, represents a break from these American restaurant dynasties—or the beginning of a new one, perhaps. A first-generation Peruvian-American of Chinese descent, he trained with his father as a sushi chef in Miami (and alongside his sister Valerie, who won her own James Beard Award last year). Through study and a deep commitment to culture, Chang developed a singular vision of Nikkei cuisine. He confesses that Itamae AO may not be the soundest of business models (a sentiment echoed by a number of his tasting menu peers), but “fine dining allows for expression, for you to see traditions in ways that haven’t been done before,” he says.

Jon Yao, too, opened Kato as a scrappy strip mall tasting menu without formal training. This year, he won Best Chef: California after evolving the restaurant into a preeminent Los Angeles destination with $325 set menus and a highly curated experience. Yao’s voice emerged in a relative bubble, he says. “We’re interested in representing our region in terms of history, stories, and products. What comes out is naturally unique,” says Yao. “What we’re doing isn’t dictated by what came before us.”

It’s not particularly in vogue to champion luxury restaurants. At the awards, chefs heralded their teams, heritage, and communities. And rightly so. The era of unadulterated chef worship was toxic and exhausting and erased the contributions of countless workers. But as the 2025 James Beard Awards asserted, there’s no denying the centrality of fine dining in America—as the foundation of the industry’s standards and aspirations, as the stuffy strictures chefs so gleefully rebel against, as an institution immigrants have helped build and lead, as an evolving medium of artistry and emotive power.

But no one talked about those things, not on stage, at least.

“I have only cried at one restaurant in my life,” Chang told me after his win. “The only Ratatouille moment I’ve ever had was at Kato with Jon Yao. I grew up eating Chinese food in Peru, but it wasn’t championed. And when I had those flavors at Kato, with that kind of attention to detail, I realized I wanted to do the same thing. That is what is important with fine dining.”