Tuesday, March 20, 2007
Inside CL Congratulations, Besha!
Posted by David Lee Simmons on Tue, Mar 20, 2007 at 4:15 PM
Besha Rodell came to Creative Loafing as the food editor last spring with plenty of experience in the food-writing biz as well as in the restaurant industry. Having lived all over, Besha always seemed to navigate her way through her newfound terrain or workload.
But nothing prepared Besha for Atlanta, in which she not only had to fill the plus-size shoes of predecessor Bill Addison — who later would earn a prestigious James Beard Foundation Journalism Award nomination for his work at CL — but also had to get smart fast on Atlanta’s huge dining scene.
So, as she would later write, Besha ate her way through Atlanta one restaurant at a time (though it seemed like three at a time). But it was her passion for fresh ingredients cultivated on area farms (and how they impacted on local restaurants) that really resonated with readers, CL staffers and, ultimately, the James Beard Foundation Journalism Awards committee.
You see, on Monday, March 19, Besha became the second consecutive CL food critic to earn a nomination from the folks at James Beard for her 2006 Food Issue (“From the farm to your tableâ€) special section. The nomination comes in the category Newspaper Feature Writing about Restaurants and/or Chefs with or without Recipes; she is in prestigious company in the category, joining the Wall Street Journal’s Kate McLaughlin (“Gourmet Canned Cuisineâ€) and the Arizona Republic’s Barbara Yost (“Bringing a Restaurant to Lifeâ€). She also joins more veteran South-based food writers John T. Edge and John Kessler — both nominated for work in the AJC (Edge also got a nod for a piece he did for Gourmet magazine).
I mention this for a variety of reasons, not just to say she joins a group that’s been around the Atlanta block more than a few times, but also to underscore the notion that, like them, Besha appreciates the influence of food on a region’s culture.
Congrats, Besha.
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