Carlos Delgado, the chef at Blagden Alley Peruvian restaurants Causa and Amazonia, is our area’s latest winner of a Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic James Beard award. At the Monday night ceremony in Chicago, the Lima native took the stage with chef de cuisine Alex Lazo standing behind him holding a Peruvian flag. “This whole thing is an immigrant dream, an immigrant story” Delgado said. “I migrated here in 2001 or 2002, and this is a dream of mine since I was a little kid.”
Delgado noted that Causa and its more casual upstairs bar Amazonia, took three and a half years to get off the ground before it debuted in May 2022, and almost didn’t open at all. The seafood-focused tasting room has gathered several accolades in its short life, including the #1 spot on Washingtonian’s 2024 100 Very Best Restaurants list, a Michelin star, and a Rammy award for fine dining restaurant of the year.
Despite some big-deal nominations, it was an otherwise quiet night for DC at the food world’s most high-profile award ceremony (especially compared to last year’s showing). Moon Rabbit’s Susan Bae lost the Outstanding Pastry Chef award to Tulsa’s Cat Cox. Plant-based Shaw dining room Mita was bested in the New Restaurant category by Minneapolis’s Bucheron. And the Outstanding Restaurateur award, one of the evening’s top prizes, went to New York’s Lee Hanson and Riad Nasr of Frenchette and Le Veau d’Or, not Anju/Chiko’s Danny Lee and Scott Drewno. Henji Cheung, chef/co-owner of Columbia Heights restaurant Queen’s English, was also a contender for the Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic medal.
The James Beard Media Awards were announced at a separate ceremony held on Saturday. There, Washington Post food editor Joe Yonan won the Vegetable-Based Cooking category for his cookbook Mastering the Art of Plant-Based Cooking. And pastry chef Paola Velez—once a finalist for a Beard Rising Star chef award—was lauded for her cookbook Bodega Bakes in the Emerging Voice category.
Find a complete list of 2025 James Beard award winners here.
Ann Limpert joined Washingtonian in late 2003. She was previously an editorial assistant at Entertainment Weekly and a cook in New York restaurant kitchens, and she is a graduate of the Institute of Culinary Education. She lives in Petworth.
