Wednesday, May 8, 2019

Chef Ann Kim takes home the James Beard Award

May 8, 2019 — Schwan’s Chef Collective officially has a James Beard Award-winning chef in its lineup. This week, Ann Kim accepted the highest honor for culinary achievement when she was announced by the James Beard Foundation as the Best Chef in the Midwest. Kim was a finalist for the award alongside Jamie Malone, who is also a member of the Schwan’s Chef Collective.

READ: Click here to see all award recipients.



The James Beard Foundation celebrated all of its award finalists and announced the winners at the James Beard Awards Gala in Chicago, Illinois. Best chef categories are segmented into 10 regions. The Midwest region that Kim won includes chefs from Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, Missouri, North Dakota, South Dakota, Kansas and Nebraska. In addition to the regional chef awards, the James Beard Foundation also presented awards for categories including best restaurant design, lifetime achievement and humanitarian of the year.

About Chef Ann Kim

Kim attributes helping her mother cook Korean dishes growing up, along with eating a multitude of New York pizza while studying at Columbia University, to her career as the Owner and Executive Chef of Young Joni and her other two restaurants — Pizzeria Lola and Hello Pizza.

By late 2010, Ann’s artisan wood-fired pizzeria in Minneapolis, Pizzeria Lola, gained national attention by New York Post, USA Today, Food & Wine’s list as one of the best pizza places in the U.S., and was featured on the Food Network’s “Diner Drive-Ins and Dives.”

Other highlights and awards of Ann include:

  • Pizzeria Lola was named “2014 Independent Pizzeria of the Year” by Pizza Today.
  • She was named the “2014 Emerging Woman Business Owner of the Year” by the National Association of Women Business Owners.
  • Pizzeria Lola was named to the “Top 20 Best Pizzerias in the World” by Daniel Young, author of Where to Eat.

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