3 people with ties to Las Vegas win James Beard media awards

Kim Foster knew her essay “The Dysfunction of Food” wasn’t the sort of thing that usually won a James Beard Award.

But it did.

Foster’s work won the personal essay, long form category of the 2020 awards, which were announced Wednesday.

Two other people with ties to Las Vegas also won Beard awards. Roy Choi, whose restaurant Best Friend is at Park MGM, won for outstanding personality/host for his “Broken Bread,” which airs on Vegas PBS. And Leo Robitschek won the beverage with recipes category for “The NoMad Cocktail Book.” The NoMad hotel, restaurant and bar is in New York and at Park MGM.

In what is no doubt a first for the Beard awards, Foster’s essay focused on McDonald’s, and the role the chain plays in the lives of children in foster care.

“This piece is really important to me in terms of issues, and I felt like it was a new and different way of talking about people through the lens of food,” Foster said in an interview Thursday.

An excerpt from her essay:

“Although most of the research out there shows that rich people eat just as much fast food as poor people, my personal experience as a foster parent is that people living deeply in the margins, drug-addicted with highly unstable lives, depend a lot on fast food to get from one day to the next. McDonald’s is a big part of that.

“This is especially true for kids bounced around in foster care. For them, McDonald’s is consistency and permanence — the burger will always taste the same, the nuggets, the fries, they will never change. And wherever you go, whatever family takes you in this time, no matter how many times you move, the Play Place rocks the same colors, the same netting, the same slides and tunnels. The same smell. The same place to take off your shoes and push them into the little shoe holder that is the same in every franchise.”

Foster said she hoped her approach would strike a chord.

“Sometimes food writing can be stuck in this ‘I learned about foods by watching my grandmother’ ” vein, she said. “We all write stuff like that; there’s nothing wrong with that. But I felt like this time I had something to say that was just different than the stuff I usually write.”

The essay recounts the latter stages of the process that led Foster and her husband, David (president of Spiegelworld, which produces “Absinthe” and two other shows here), from fostering to adopting children Raffi and Desi. The family, which also includes daughters Edie and Lucy, moved to Las Vegas about six years ago from New York City, where she taught English at Pace University.

Foster has written for local and national publications, is the host of the Please Send Noodles cookbook club and recently started a newsletter, which, along with her essay, can be found at kimfoster.substack.com or her website, kim-foster.com.

Contact Heidi Knapp Rinella at hrinella@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0474. Follow @HKRinella on Twitter.