On Monday evening some of the country’s most celebrated chefs, beverage professionals, restaurateurs and bakers filled Chicago’s Lyric Opera House for the 35th annual James Beard Foundation Restaurant and Chef Awards. The awards are considered some of the highest honors in hospitality, and this year, amid nationwide deportations and a mounting culture of fear, winners throughout the night honored immigrants: often the unsung staff working in restaurant kitchens.
“We tell stories,” said Kato chef-partner Jon Yao, “stories of immigrants, diaspora, endurance and perseverance.”
Yao won the 2025 category of best chef: California. At his fine-dining restaurant in the Arts District — No. 1 on the L.A. Times 101 List for the last two years in a row — he serves a pioneering tasting menu evocative of his Taiwanese heritage seen through an L.A. lens.
Yao’s win marks the third year in a row that a Los Angeles nominee took the title of best chef in the state. In 2023 Justin Pichetrungsi of Anajak Thai won the category, while last year the honor went to Kuya Lord chef-owner Lord Maynard Llera.
Yao is the only Los Angeles or Orange County nominee to win an award at this year’s Restaurant and Chef Awards ceremony.
The Kato chef was a semifinalist or nominee in the rising star category in 2018, 2019 and 2020.
Yao, a child of Taiwanese immigrants who grew up in the San Gabriel Valley, thanked everyone on Kato’s team, both past and present. He underscored the importance of immigrant cuisine not only for Kato but Los Angeles.
“L.A. is a city built by the toils of immigrant communities, and right now, those same communities are being ripped apart,” Yao said in his acceptance speech. “As the children of immigrants, I’m sure many here can imagine a scenario where we couldn’t be here to celebrate this all together. But we all deserve the freedom to pursue our dreams, to determine our own futures and to be treated with equal dignity and respect. And everyone in this room tonight has the ability and voice to amplify that message through their own stories in their own communities, and I urge all of us to please use that voice and platform.”
The culinary contributions of immigrants could be heard in acceptance speeches through the night, across a range of cultures. Chefs, restaurateurs and food media regularly praised America’s diversity of flavor, widely crediting immigrants.
“All food is immigrant, and immigrants make America great,” Miami chef Nando Chang said when he won best chef: South.
“We’re gathering at a time of challenge and fear,” Clare Reichenbach, chief executive officer of the James Beard Foundation, said in the ceremony’s opening speech.“That’s why it is so important to remember the agency we possess, that hope and empathy are an active choice we can make, and that we’re connecting tonight in our shared humanity and in the celebration of food and its unique power to unite. … America’s food scene has never been more dynamic, more diverse and exciting — and in large part, we owe that dynamism, that vibrancy, to the immigrant communities that lead and underpin this industry in every way. We get to taste the world because of them.”
Washington, D.C., chef Carlos Delgado of Causa and Amazonia accepted the award of best chef: Mid-Atlantic and voiced his support of immigrants while his colleague proudly carried a Peruvian flag to the stage.
San Juan’s Identidad won Best New Bar, and its owners carried a Puerto Rican flag for their acceptance speech. “I want this to serve as an inspiration to all Puerto Ricans — and Latinos — that it can be done,” co-owner Stephen Alonso said.
Best chef: Great Lakes winner Noah Sandoval of Chicago’s Oriole, couldn’t attend the evening’s ceremony, so a friend read a statement in his stead: “Thank you, and deepest respect to all the nominees and winners tonight. Also, f— ICE.”
When Kumiko owner Julia Momosé accepted the award for Outstanding Bar, she underscored the importance of immigrants not only to her own Chicago establishment, but also the industry. “Every day we are a team of immigrants,” she said. “We are children of immigrants … your perspective is your strength.”
Los Angeles native, former L.A. Times food writer and community activist Toni Tipton-Martin received the lifetime achievement award, celebrating her decades of contribution to food journalism by raising African American culinary voices and platforming young writers.
Last year Ruth Reichl, another Los Angeles Times Food vet, received the lifetime achievement award. Tipton-Martin thanked Reichl in her own acceptance speech for helping to guide her culinary voice early in her career.
Though most of Southern California’s nominees did not win this year, their contributions to the county’s culinary fabric were still recognized.
“You are not just an incredible pitmaster, but you’re incredibly creative, and you’re sort of creating a style of barbecue that you call Southern California barbecue,” food journalist and red carpet host Francis Lam told Daniel Castillo before the ceremony. “It’s not Texas barbecue, it’s not Carolina barbecue, but Southern California barbecue.”
Castillo co-owns San Juan Capistrano’s Heritage Barbecue and Santa Ana’s Le Hut Dinette, and was nominated for best chef: California, which Yao won. San Diego’s Tara Monsod, of Animae and Le Coq, was also a nominee in the category.
Gusto Bread, the Long Beach artisanal panadería from owners Arturo Enciso and Ana Belén Salatino, was nominated in the category of outstanding bakery as it also was in 2024. The lauded bakery did not win this year; that award went to JinJu Patisserie in Portland, Ore.
Anaheim’s Strong Water is widely celebrated for its spins on classic tiki drinks as well as its ambitious nonalcoholic program. Like Gusto it was nominated in 2024, but this year’s award for outstanding wine and other beverages went to Charleston in Baltimore, Maryland.
Redbird bar director Tobin Shea was nominated in the category of outstanding professional in cocktail service, which went to Ignacio Jimenez of New York City’s Superbueno. Whether he was going to win or lose, Shea previously told The Times that he would be celebrating: This year’s awards fell on the week of his 50th birthday. “It’s going to be a great week,” he said.
On Saturday night the foundation held its annual media awards, which celebrate the year’s top culinary books, articles, television, radio and more. Los Angeles Times restaurant critic Bill Addison, columnist Jenn Harris and Food senior editor Danielle Dorsey all saw nominations this year.
Andrea Freeman — a professor at L.A.’s Southwestern Law School — took the award in the category for food issues and advocacy with her book “Ruin Their Crops on the Ground: The Politics of Food in the United States, from the Trail of Tears to School Lunch.”
L.A.-based journalist Jeff Gordinier, along with artist and designer George McCalman, won the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award for Food & Wine article “The City That Rice Built.”
Another Los Angeles-based author, Gastropod podcast co-host Nicola Twilley, also won an award. Her book “Frostbite: How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet, and Ourselves” led the category of literary writing.
The full list of the 2025 James Beard Media Award winners can be found here.
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