Munchies People's Choice Awards 2014 Winners Announced
If the James Beard Awards are formal and prestigious Oscars of the culinary world, then the Munchies awards are like the People's Choice Awards: They're a fun way of recognizing food and drink's most talented chef personalities, most delicious restaurants and food trucks, and well-deserved accolades for best members of food media. The expert panel of 40 culinary experts judged the Munchie awards this year, led by food TV personality Andrew Zimmern.
To start off with, in the media world, Best Food TV Show went to Top Chef, while Bobby Flay won Favorite Food TV Personality (what a coincidence! He also made our list of 60 Coolest People in Food and Drink this year). The big prize went to April Bloomfield who took home the award for Best Chef.
In the Best Bites category, Best Pizza went to Roberta's in Brooklyn (and Roberta's came in at #6 in The Daily Meal's 101 Best Pizzas in America list). Best Burger went to the original Shake Shack in New York. No surprise there. The Daily Meal agreed, as Shake Shack topped our list this year of America's Best Chain Burgers.
For Delicious Destinations, the Best Food Truck was found to be Guerilla Street Food in St. Louis (Guerilla landed on our 2013 101 Best Food Trucks in America list at a comfortable #17 spot). And as for the Best Brunch Spot, the folks at Munchies say you're going to have to The Publican in Chicago.
Joanna Fantozzi is an Associate Editor with The Daily Meal. Follow her on Twitter @JoannaFantozzi