Nominees this year featured some books we expected (Momofuku, Ad Hoc at Home), left off some that surprised us (where was Sam Beall's fantastic The Blackberry Farm Cookbook? Or The Big Sur Bakery Cookbook?) and decidedly favored Southern cuisine. We've made some tough calls below.

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On display at the Beard House's Greenhouse Gallery through the end of October is the photo exhibit "Back of the House" by photographer Michael Harlan Turkell. You may know his work as the photo editor of the Edible Brooklyn and Edible Manhattan magazines. [via Tasting Table]

The theme of this year's James Beard awards gala is "Women in Food." The gala, it's worth noting, is not the awards ceremony — it's the post-ceremony tasting reception, in which black-tie-clad winners and losers mingle with paying-ticket plebes and starstruck food journalists to fight over bite-sized skewers of foie gras, and cluster around the multiple open bars. So it's really nice and all that they're honoring the girls in the kitchen by letting them cook for the rest of the guests, but we can't help but feel that this is a bit of misdirected pandering.

Of this year's nominees for the Restaurant and Chef awards — the ones that, let's face it, are the only ones most people care about — women aren't too well represented. It's no worse than any other year, sure, but contrasted against the hot-pink announcements that this year's gala is "celebrating Women in Food," the asymmetry comes into sharp relief.

What were those numbers, again? »