It almost seems like Dallas should be covered in Beards.
The most-recognized Texas chef for a prestigious James Beard Foundation award is a Dallas chef. The Texas restaurant to have gotten the most notice in those annual awards is a Dallas restaurant. Going back to 1991, Dallas has the most nominees and second-most semifinalists of any place in Texas.
What no one in Dallas food service has done in a quarter-century, however, is win.
“It’s really unfathomable to me,” said Stephan Pyles, one of two Dallas chefs ever to win a James Beard award. “It’s not like we’re this eighth-tier city.”
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The process to determine Dallas’ next shot at a winner continues Tuesday, with the announcement of the foundation’s 2026 nominees. The foundation announced its list of semifinalists eligible to become nominees in January, which includes six from Dallas. Winners are announced in June.
Since the last time Dallas won an award, Austin has claimed seven, most recently in 2025.
Houston’s last win was in 2023. The city is home to five other winners since Dallas last took one home and ties Austin for the most wins in Texas overall, almost double Dallas’ four.
Places like Galveston and Mission and Brownsville and Taylor and Buffalo Gap all have wins since The Original Sonny Bryan’s on Inwood Road won in the American Classics category in 2000, the most recent James Beard award winner in any chef and restaurant category in Dallas. Originally part of the Southwest region, Texas switched to its own award category in 2020.
No Texas chef has appeared more often in James Beard award results than Pyles, who has done so 10 times. The fifth-generation Texan won Best Chef Southwest in 1991 for his Routh Street Cafe, one pearl on the string of restaurants he led for nearly 40 years.
“The talent is here,” he said.
James Beard Dallas drought
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The time since, with no other winners in the city, has left plenty of room for those in the business to guess at a why.
Paula Lambert, cheesemaker and founder of the Mozzarella Company in Deep Ellum, won in 1998 in a Who’s Who of Food and Wine category. She said it could be that large restaurant groups from Miami or Las Vegas bring chains with them and obscure what homegrown chefs offer.
“Maybe that’s what people see, and it’s just not that interesting,” she said. “They’re missing out.”
Dean Fearing said he feels like he’s been looking over his shoulder for 32 years, waiting for the next Dallas winner. His 1994 win came when he led the kitchen at the Mansion on Turtle Creek, and the category was called Best Chefs in America Southwest. It is the most recent win for any Dallas chef.
He was nominated again in two categories in 2008, but came up empty-handed. Now at his namesake restaurant in the Dallas Ritz-Carlton, Fearing said it could be that not enough judges make it to Dallas or take it seriously.
“It’s sad that that’s it,” he said. “It should be a longer list.”
Bruno Davaillon talks to chef de cuisine Jason Maddy (right) while Davaillon prepares a dish at The Mansion Restaurant shortly after becoming executive chef in 2009.
KYE R. LEE / 145072
Before Bruno Davaillon was managing partner and culinary director for Travis Street Hospitality, he was responsible for The Mansion’s most recent consideration for a James Beard award: 2014, as a semifinalist for Outstanding Service. Two years earlier, he was a nominee there for Best Chefs in America Southwest. In 2019, he was again a semifinalist, this time at Bullion. He said it’s possible that Austin or Houston have deeper wells of restaurant labor, that the sheer numbers of new restaurants stretch thin the available talent.
“Everyone’s fighting for the same people,” he said.
It could also be, Davaillon said, that while overall quality in Dallas restaurants remains high, no one has broken through from culinary to broader cultural influence the way that Pyles and Fearing – and, in Houston, Robert Del Grande – did decades ago with their reimagining of Southwest flavors.
“Back in the day, they were doing something exciting in U.S. cuisine,” he said. “It went beyond Texas. And remember, Texas is bigger than France.”
For Anastacia Quiñones-Pittman, the lack of any one answer draws more attention to the question. She has been a semifinalist three times, in 2022, 2023 and 2024, when she was chef at José, on Lovers Lane.
“I’d really like to know what it is,” she said, now a consultant as she works to open her next restaurant, Eledi. “I do work with the Beard Foundation, and I love that work. I’m excited about that work. But it feels like there should be an answer, right?”
Chef Anastacia Quinoñes-Pittman prepares a dish from cattle raised in a Texas panhandle feed yard in 2023.
Tom Fox / Staff Photographer
The James Beard Foundation did not respond to a request for an interview about awards data it considers proprietary.
The last winner
Brent Harman’s father, Walker, bought Sonny Bryan’s from the man himself in 1989, when Brent was in high school. He learned the history, like all about Julia Child making it her first stop after dropping her bags every trip to Dallas, and how young chefs like Fearing would hang out at the counter to see just how many secrets they could learn about the recipes and techniques Bryan kept in a lockbox.
“I didn’t know that we were the last,” said Harman, now company president and CEO. “I’m really surprised to hear that.”
Bryan himself had been gone 11 years when the restaurant won in 2000. A sale to investors shortly before his death ended eight decades of his family making barbecue in North Texas and 31 years for himself.
Harman said recognition from the award, and the perception of Sonny Bryan’s as a classic, didn’t mean it couldn’t or shouldn’t evolve. Bryan himself was always learning something, trying something, Harman said, even if there were immutable truths like dipping the onion rings in the sauce.
“He started out with girls on roller skates selling malts and maybe a burger, I think,” Harman said. “There was no dining room when he opened, all the food came out to your car. Sonny was changing things constantly.”
Some of the inspiration for that sat right at the counter.
“Dean learned from Sonny, and I’m sure Sonny learned something from Dean,” Harman said.
The Mansion legacy
The Mansion has made 20 total appearances in James Beard awards results, the most of any restaurant in Texas, across the tenures of several of Dallas’ most notable chefs. Built in 1925 as a residence and a restaurant since 1980, it comes in and out of award results through the years, though not since Davaillon’s recognition in 2014. The Mansion’s only win was Fearing’s 20 years earlier.
“That was my greatest moment at the time,” Fearing said. “We were doing something down in a place called Dallas, Texas, and needed that recognition to get the word out.”
(Left to right) Chef Wolfgang Puck talks with Nils Stolzlechner, GM of Omni Dallas Hotel, and a howling Dean Fearing in 2012. Puck came to Dallas to visit his restaurant, Five Sixty by Wolfgang Puck. He had just won a James Beard award for lifetime achievement.
Kye R. Lee / File Photo
Dallas dining has worn many faces since then. The improvisational locavore mastery of Sharon Hage at York Street Cafe. Teiichi Sakurai’s celebration of buckwheat, whimsy and clean technique at Tei-An. The consistent execution and Italy-spiked imagination of David Uygur. The personal and profound menus of Quiñones-Pittman. So many more.
And while chasing awards isn’t a primary focus for most chefs, a win is meaningful.
“It sounds cheesy when people say it about the Emmys or the Oscars, but it really is an honor to be nominated,” Quiñones-Pittman said.
She said she makes sure to check the lists of semifinalists and nominees every year so she can text her friends and celebrate them when she sees their names published.
“My bar manager is nominated, and it’s so exciting,” she said. “We tell him it’s part of his title now.”
Fearing said the award comes with real, if intangible, value.
“It holds a lot of collateral,” he said.
(Left to right) Octavia Flores stacks molds while Paula Lambert stirs a vat of curds with ancho chiles which will become cheese, in 1998. Lambert won her James Beard award the same year.
Natalie Caudill / 112521
For Lambert, her award meant less friction in getting phone calls returned or securing an introduction to people at places where she might sell her cheese.
“I don’t make a lot of those calls anymore, but you could see how it opened doors,” she said. “People wanted to talk to you.”
The next contenders
According to the foundation’s rules, anyone can recommend a bar, restaurant or chef for an award. That includes chefs, who can suggest themselves or their establishments. The foundation’s judges and awards subcommittee members – the latter a volunteer group of industry professionals, academics, writers and reviewers that changes every year – also search on their own.
“I just don’t know what it is about Dallas,” Lambert said. “It’s very interesting that it’s been so long.”
After the Mansion, the Dallas restaurant most familiar to James Beard voters is Revolver Taco Lounge and its Purépecha Room in Deep Ellum, with seven semifinalist finishes since 2018 and a nomination in 2025 for Regino Rojas as Best Chef: Texas.
The eighth for Lucia, in Bishop Arts, came this year. Maggie Huff is a semifinalist in the Outstanding Pastry Chef or Baker category. The restaurant’s other seven nods, most recently in 2024, highlight Uygur, a chef whose early career included prepping the famous mushroom soup at the much-missed Grape.
Should Huff not win her category, Dallas is home to five more hopefuls who could break the city’s 25-year winless streak:
Far-Out for Best New RestaurantStarship Bagel for Outstanding BakeryAyahuasca Cantina for Outstanding BarGabe Sanchez of Midnight Rambler for Outstanding Professional in Cocktail ServiceMasayuki Otaka of Mabo for Best Chef: Texas