Observer Food Monthly announces 2016 awards

The 2016 Observer Food Monthly awards were announced at a gala celebration last Thursday. The awards, in their 13th year, celebrate the best of British food and drink. Categories range from best restaurant and best cheap eats to best food personality to best market and more, including our favorite, best new cookbook. While most of the categories are for professionals and businesses, there is an award for best reader’s recipe. Judges are drawn from across the food industry. EYB Member favorites like Nigella Lawson, Nathan Outlaw, Nigel Slater and Lorraine Pascale are all on the judging panel. 

The 2016 Best New Cookbook Award went to Our Korean Kitchen by Jordan Bourke and Rejina Pyo. The book can be viewed as “a love story: of Pyo and Bourke as a couple; and of Bourke towards a cuisine little known in the UK,” notes interviewer Tim Lewis. The pair met in 2008, when Bourke was transforming from a career in media to being a chef. Bourke first trained at Ballymaloe cookery school in Ireland, and now mixes writing with consulting and pop-up supper clubs. He has written two other cookbooks prior to Our Korean Kitchen,  The Guilt-Free Gourmet and The Natural Food Kitchen.

Jamie Oliver took home the award for Best Food Personality and Pierre Koffman nabbed the Lifetime Achievement Award. Edinburgh food blogger Kerry Teacle won the reader’s recipe award with her whisky, orange and almond cake. The recipe will be published in indexed magazine Observer Food Monthly,  so keep an eye out for it in next month’s issue.