Enter the 2024 James Beard Awards

Enter the Awards here.

The Call for Entries and Recommendations for the 2024 James Beard Awards is officially open until November 30, 2023 at 11:59 P.M. ET!

We’re looking for chefs, creators, food system leaders, and more who could be the next James Beard Award winners! Whether you published a cookbook in the last year, own a restaurant, or advocate for food system change, we encourage you to submit your entries and recommend your talented colleagues.

For more than 30 years, the annual James Beard Awards have awarded exceptional talent in the culinary arts, hospitality, food media, and the broader food system. The Awards also recognize a demonstrated commitment to racial and gender equity, community, sustainability, and creating a culture where all can thrive. The 2024 Awards ceremonies will be held in Chicago from June 8-10, 2024.

The James Beard Awards presented by Capital One consist of four separate recognition programs and three achievement awards: Media Awards (Book, Broadcast Media, and Journalism) and Restaurant and Chef Awards; Leadership Awards, Lifetime Achievement, and Humanitarian of the Year Award.

Submitting a recommendation for the Leadership or Restaurant and Chef Awards is free and open to the public. The Media Awards (Book, Broadcast Media, and Journalism) conduct Open Call for Entries that require an entry fee of $85 per entry, but fee waivers can be requested if the fee presents hardship. The deadline for entries and recommendations is November 30, 2023 and 11:59 P.M. ET.

“We were thrilled to celebrate excellent talent from so many corners of the country in 2023; it's hard to believe that the 2024 awards are already upon us. The Foundation welcomes authors, journalists, content creators, chefs, restaurateurs, others in the hospitality industry and leaders in the broader food system, to submit their entries for the 2024 awards,” says Dawn Padmore, vice president of awards, James Beard Foundation. “We also extend an open invitation to the general public, to put forward their recommendations for the Restaurant and Chef and Leadership Awards.”

Each year, the Award subcommittees may make changes or additions to categories, in order to reflect and capture current trends in the industry and to align with the overall priorities of the organization. Here are some of the changes to the 2024 James Beard Awards categories:

Broadcast Media

• The Documentary/Docuseries Visual Media category has been split into two: Documentary Visual Media and Docuseries Visual Media.
• The Instructional Visual Media category description has been updated to include educational content.
• The Unscripted Visual Media category replaces the Reality or Competition Visual Media category.

Journalism

• The Innovative Storytelling title has been changed to Innovative Visual Storytelling to highlight that this is a multi-media (writing and visual) category.
• The Craig Claiborne Distinguished Restaurant Review Award is now titled the Craig Claiborne Distinguished Criticism Award to better reflect the landscape of restaurant and food culture reviews and criticism.

Leadership Awards

• Open Call for Recommendations change: Leadership Awards recommendations now require two (2) references, as part of the Open Call for Recommendations process.

The 2024 Leadership Awards categories were created by the James Beard Foundation, with input from the Leadership Committee, as a reflection of the Foundation's policy agenda and impact priorities for 2023-2024. This year's categroies are:

• Sustainability
• Policy Advocacy
• Industry Culture and Practices
• Food Security and Access

As announced last year, as of the 2023 Awards, the eligibility time frame for the Restaurant and Chef Awards program is from October to October (instead of a calendar year). For the June 2024 Restaurant and Chef Awards, the eligibility time frame will be October 1, 2022 through September 30, 2023. Businesses opening after September 30, 2023 will be under the eligibility time frame for the June 2025 Restaurant and Chef Awards. For all awards that require years in service, one year is counted October 1 through September 30. For categories where restaurants or chefs have to be open or in the region for a minimum number of years, the years will be counted back from September 30, not including any time closed during the pandemic.

As part of all Awards submissions, the Foundation requires a short statement, written (150-300 words) or recorded (audio or video, 1-2 minutes) by the entrant or recommender. The statement offers a chance to tell the committees and judges a little more about the candidate and their work, and how their work expresses aspects of the mission and the Foundation’s values: equity, transparency, respect, integrity, and community. The statement is reviewed for content and not for language fluency, video quality, or production value.

To learn more about this year's changes and entry period, read the full press release or head to our Awards page for more information.