SC restaurant and chef get national nods as 2022 James Beard Award semifinalists
The nation’s premier culinary institution on Wednesday named both a Charleston chef and a Charleston restaurant among its list of semifinalists for the 2022 James Beard Awards, accolades considered so prestigious that they have come to be known as the Oscars of the food industry.
Butcher & Bee, which opened on King Street in 2011 with a humble vision of serving up honest-to-goodness sandwiches, is one of 20 nominees for Outstanding Restaurant.
Orlando Pagán, the executive chef at Wild Common, is among the 20 semifinalists for Best Chef: Southeast, a regional category that spans Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and West Virginia.
The two Charleston-based contenders are the only semifinalists from South Carolina on the roster of James Beard Foundation nominees.
Wild Common, located on Spring Street, serves a four-course tasting menu — one of only a handful to do so in Charleston.
For Butcher & Bee, this is the first time the restaurant itself — and not its former pastry chef — has been recognized by the acclaimed foundation. Owner Michael Shemtov said the entire staff, from the bakery in the back to the host team in the front, feel “truly humbled.”
In an emailed statement, Shemtov said he found himself reflecting on the night of the first “dry run” for his first restaurant: a Mellow Mushroom in downtown Charleston in 2001.
“My mentor told me that we’d built out a beautiful space, but that was the easy part,” Shemtov said. “The hard part was now ahead of us — ensuring consistency. That comes through grit and hard work, and that is a big part of why this recognition, in a category that is about consistent excellence over time, is so meaningful.”
Butcher & Bee, which is now located on Morrison Drive, also made a name for itself during the pandemic when it launched Pay it Forward Charleston. The restaurant team joined forces with farmers, restaurants and community members to feed laid-off food and beverage workers during the COVID-19 crisis.
In July 2019, while campaigning for the Democratic Party’s 2020 presidential nomination, then-candidate and now-President Joe Biden made a campaign stop alongside former Charleston Mayor Joe Riley at Butcher & Bee, where they also ate lunch.
For Pagán, who grew up in Puerto Rico where some of his fondest memories were cooking in the kitchen and watching “Great Chefs of the World,” this is his first James Beard nomination.
Pagán’s first job in the restaurant industry was working as a bus boy, according to his restaurant bio, but he soon longed to be a chef. He left Puerto Rico after high school to attend Johnson & Wales University in Miami.
He spent three years at the Ritz-Carlton Coconut Grove’s Bizcaya Grill Restaurant but later moved across the country to San Francisco, where he later landed a job as the executive chef of The Village Pub, a Michelin-starred eatery.
In 2017, Pagán moved across country again and landed in Charleston when he joined James Beard Award-winning Chef Sean Brock as chef de cuisine of McCrady’s Tavern. Pagán was promoted to executive chef in summer of 2018. The next year, Pagán helped open Wild Common.
But in 2010, Pagán was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a neurological disease in which the body’s immune system attacks the central nervous system.
In an interview last year with the Charleston City Paper, Pagán shared how the disease impacted his professional life and how he learned to ask for help in the kitchen.
“This illness is very difficult to understand,” Pagán told the weekly newspaper. “There’s days I wake up with no energy, and I did everything I could.”
If he wins, Pagán would be following in the footsteps of other Charleston-area chefs who have taken home the award for Best Chef Southeast, including Brock, Mike Lata of FIG and Hominy Grill’s Robert Stehling.
The awards went on hiatus last year, due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
In 2020, South Carolina had a stronger overall James Beard showing, with eight semifinalists from the Palmetto State. However, Charleston was still the culinary heavy-hitter in the state, with six of the eight semifinalists hailing from the Charleston area.
Finalists for the James Beard Foundation’s Restaurant and Chef Awards will be revealed March 16, along with the winners of the foundation’s Lifetime Achievement, Leadership Honorees and Humanitarian awards.
The winners will be announced June 13 in Chicago.
This story was originally published February 23, 2022 at 3:03 PM.
