This “backstory” is a part of a collection of articles that describes some of the obstacles that Seven Days reporters faced while pursuing Vermont news, events and people in 2025.
Industry folks refer to the James Beard Foundation’s annual Restaurant and Chef Awards as “the Oscars of the food world.” But some chefs pay more attention to such recognition than others — and food journalists tend to pay more attention than the chefs do, at least first thing in the morning on announcement day.
That’s how I found myself congratulating Charlie Menard, owner of Canteen Creemee in Waitsfield, for making the semifinalist list in the Best Chef: Northeast category. I sent him a text asking for comment at 10:30 a.m. on Wednesday, January 22, roughly 20 minutes after the list was posted on the foundation’s website.
He hadn’t heard the news. I’m not sure he’d even woken up yet.
“Woah” is all he had to say until the afternoon, when we chatted by phone. Even then, he was having trouble believing me.
“I was like, Nah, this is fake,” he said, chuckling. “Then I realized that Seven Days probably had alerts set up for this sort of thing.”
I did, but only because I’d been caught off guard by the announcement’s timing in the past. We get plenty of press releases about gold medal-winning cheeses and beers, but the James Beard Awards are among the only national food and drink accolades we report on. They’re just that big of a deal. While Vermont doesn’t get as many nominations as Boston or New York, it’s exciting to be the first to break our local version of the news.
I had prewritten a draft of the story the night before with background on the state’s previous contenders. All I had to do was fill in the semifinalists’ names and upload a photo or two. We published online at 10:27 a.m. and updated the story with Menard’s surprised comments at 1:30 p.m.
His skepticism was warranted: Canteen Creemee is known for, well, its creemees. They’re over-the-top and delightful but not the sort of cuisine the awards historically recognized in the Best Chef categories. As Menard told me, he thought he’d left the Beard-bait part of his career behind when he swapped a fine-dining “executive chef” title for “owner of a snack shack” in 2016.
Since a public reckoning in 2020 with how the awards are decided, the Beards have been surprising us all. They seem more representative of U.S. food trends — burgers and fried chicken included. I’ve stopped trying to predict which Vermonters will be semifinalists, though it’s fun to guess.
Menard didn’t make the whittled-down list of final nominees announced on April 2. But I had an alert set for that morning, too, and you can bet I would have texted him right away.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Most Incredulous Source”
This article appears in Dec 24 2025 – Jan 6 2026.
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