James Beard Awards Dataset 2024

Context

The James Beard Foundation Awards are annual awards presented by the James Beard Foundation to recognize chefs, restaurateurs, authors and journalists in the United States. They are scheduled around James Beard's May 5 birthday. The media awards are presented at a dinner in New York City; the chef and restaurant awards were also presented in New York until 2015, when the foundation's annual gala moved to Chicago. Chicago will continue to host the Awards until 2027.

Cody Winchester has constructed a dataset of James Beard Foundation Award semifinalists, nominees, and winners since 1991, sourced from the foundation’s award-search page. For each honoree, the dataset provides their name, year, category, subcategory, and award status, plus additional category-specific variables (such as publisher for the book awards, and location for restaurant and chef awards).

A CSV file with data on James Beard Awards winners, nominees and finalists from 1991 to present -- everything from the search page, minus a few duplicates, plus some missing data.

Content

Geography: USA

Time period: 1991 - 2024

Unit of analysis:

Variables

Each awards category involves slightly different data values, so each type of record populates a slightly different subset of the fields in the CSV:

• year

• recipient_id

• recipient_name

• category

• subcategory

• award_status

• location

• restaurant_name

• company

• project

• publisher

• book_title

• publication

• show

Data fixes

The scraped data includes some incomplete and duplicate records. Most frequently, the recipient_name was missing from the HTML, though as it turns out, if you do a little research to figure out the awardee's name, searching that name on the James Beard website returns the (incomplete) record, which then allows you to match it up to its unique recipient_id.

Acknowledgements

This dataset scrapped by Cody Winchester!