The Restaurant Award Winners Will Be Announced on Monday, September 20

Up until a few weeks ago, we held out hope that we might be able to have an in-person ceremony for the 32nd* Annual Restaurant Awards. But the more we thought about it, the more we realized that the true spirit of the Restaurant Awards is not the actual awards themselves, but the coming together of the industry to celebrate all that’s great about hospitality in our city.

And the ceremony has always been the linchpin to all that. The darkened basement, the hard pre-gaming with sample sized pours, the bottles stashed under the folding chairs, that weird feeling of emerging from said basement at 4 to realize it’s sunny and evening hasn’t even started yet, the…well, you get the drift. We’ve been privileged to host what seems like a yearly class reunion for the industry.

So trying to shoehorn it into something that complies with the local regs seemed both futile and missing the point. So we’re going to channel what was one of our first of many pivots—our Takeout Thursdays, where I sat in my home office and shot the shit with some industry friends—and do these odd awards the same way. 

It won’t be the same of course, but hell, what is these days. For the sake of continuity I’ll force myself to have a bottle of Lagavulin within all too easy reach. I might put on a tie. I might sweat through a suit coat—who knows. All we can promise is that the winners will be announced, we will do our best to fete all of you and we’ll return next year with the old fashioned hell-raising event that you all deserve.

So please join us Monday, September 20 at 2pm on Instagram. Look forward to seeing you.