DC Chef Wins James Beard Award for Best Baker in the Nation

WASHINGTON, DC — The 2017 James Beard Foundation Awards has just revealed their winners, and a D.C. baker has taken home one of the most coveted awards in the culinary profession.

Mark Furstenberg, the head chef of Bread Furst in Northwest D.C., has won the award for Outstanding Baker. The James Beard Foundation states that the award goes to a "chef or baker who prepares breads, pastries, or desserts in a retail bakery, and who serves as a national standard-bearer of excellence. Must have been working as a baker or pastry chef for at least five years."

Bread Furst beat bakeries in Portland, Chicago, San Francisco, and Brooklyn for the award.

Bread Furst, located at 4434 Connecticut Avenue NW, is a fairly new restaurant, and it will celebrate its third birthday on Saturday.

"We are a neighborhood bakery where Washingtonians can buy food for daily life or for celebration," its website states. "At Bread Furst, you will find beautiful loaves of bread, bread with real character, pies, cakes and other pastries, breakfast foods of all sorts, and seasonally based savory foods for taking home. We are a neighborhood bakery, a traditional neighborhood meeting place where coffee and tea are available, a little store to which families can come for weekend breakfast and children can come for an afternoon snack."

The James Beard Award is considered to be the Academy Award for culinary excellence.

Another D.C. chef, Nora Pouillon, received a Lifetime Achievement Award. Pouillon announced recently that she would retire from her D.C. restaurant, which is famous for being the first certified organic restaurant in the United States and for being a popular hangout for former First Lady Michelle Obama.

The full list of winners is posted on the James Beard Foundation website.

Image via Bread Furst