It’s shaping up to be another rough year for Seattle at the James Beard Foundation Restaurant and Chef Awards, without a single one of the city’s eight semifinalists in national categories moving on to the finalists list. In some ways, this looks even worse than last year, when only Archipelago and Atoma represented Seattle in the national categories—Outstanding Hospitality and Best New Restaurant, respectively.
On the other hand, last year Seattle got completely shut out from the regional competition for Best Chef Northwest & Pacific, and this year, two Seattle chefs are in the mix, alongside one chef from Alaska and two from Portland: Johnny Courtney of Atoma and Aaron Tekulve of Surrell.
It’s another point in the long list of accolades for Atoma, Seattle Met’s 2024 Restaurant of the Year, where former Canlis chef Courtney’s menu of fun and fancy snack-size starters has been one of the few recent additions to Seattle’s dining scene to catch any national spotlight.
Surrell’s nomination is more surprising. A quiet Madison Park restaurant that started out as a pop-up for many years before settling down in—unfortunately—2020. The restaurant has long been on Seattle Met’s list of the best restaurants in town for a special occasion for its tasting menu of around a dozen courses that celebrate Washington’s seasonal ingredients. (It also offers a shorter, five-course menu and a wine bar with exclusively Washington wines.)
Despite Seattle’s somewhat improved representation on the longer list of semifinalists released in January, Courtney and Tekulve will be Seattle’s only hopes of breaking the city’s shutout streak: not a single win in 2022, 2023, 2024, or 2025. The awards were on hiatus in 2020 and 2021. That means the last time a Seattle chef or restaurant won was in 2019, when then-Canlis chef (now of Tomo) Brady Williams won for Best Chef Northwest.
The full list of nominations can be found here, and the award ceremony will be held in Chicago on June 15.