Since 2006, Baltimore chef Cindy Wolf’s cooking and concepts have been nominated by the James Beard Foundation 24 times, but she has yet to take home a medal. As she heads into the 2025 awards cycle with her newest nomination, she hopes that this will be her year.
Wolf’s restaurant, Charleston, is once again a finalist — this year, for the Outstanding Wine and Other Beverages Program category. The Lowcountry-inspired eatery was originally a cornerstone of Baltimore-based restaurant group Foreman Wolf, which she ran with her then-husband, Tony Foreman, until the two parted ways and split their dining portfolio at the beginning of 2025. Since then, Wolf has been the leader of Charleston under the Chef Cindy Wolf brand.
This year’s recognition holds a different significance for Wolf and her over-10-time nomination for Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic category, in more ways than one. It marks Charleston’s first accolade as a Chef Cindy Wolf brand, rather than a division of Foreman Wolf, and, to Wolf’s excitement, it celebrates the success of Charleston’s beverage staff.
If this is the first year that Wolf secures the win, it would not simply be a personal victory, but, she said, a victory for her team.
“If the kitchen didn’t do their job, we wouldn’t have this. If the front-of-the-house people didn’t know how to do their job, we definitely wouldn’t be nominated for this,” Wolf said. “What’s great about this award is that it’s not a chef award. It’s an award, truly, for the whole restaurant.”
The not-so-secret edge to Charleston’s success? A wine menu with meticulously paired wines for the restaurant’s hyper-rotational dishes — including She Crab Soup with pinot blanc, white truffle fettucine with Italian Chardonnay and beef tenderloin and Hoppin’ John with 2020 Bordeaux.
“Everything is driven to complement the food, and that’s what the [wine] list is about,” Wolf said. She added that her ideation process for wine-and-food pairings is “all about understanding the flavors of the dishes. It’s not rocket science. The fact is that you just have to taste, taste, taste, and taste it.”
Wolf credits much of the wine program’s development and success to Charleston’s head sommelier, Lindsay Willey, who, over 18 years with the restaurant, has traveled to wine-making regions across the globe for menu research and curation.
“Lindsay’s worked for me for so long. She knows my food back and forth,” said Wolf. “She knows how I think about food, and she knows what food I like.”
While Foreman is a self-proclaimed “control freak” in his restaurants, adding that “people have identified [him] with the wine program for so long,” he said he had full trust in Willey to carry on Charleston’s beverage operations after his departure.
“It was, literally, the first thing I was happy about, to just have someone else take control of,” he said. “Lindsay was a really apt taster from the start.”
As Wolf has watched the evolution of the beverage world over her 30-plus years as a professional chef, so, too, has she watched the evolution of the James Beard Awards. Monday will mark the tenth ceremony that she has attended, and, from a more luxe event space to a star-studded guest list, she said that the awards have grown considerably.
“It went from being everybody sitting in a banquet chair in rows to being in an opera house in black tie,” she said. “That’s how far the awards have come in magnitude and prestige, and I’ve been there for that change.”
The 2025 James Beard Awards will begin the evening of June 16 (and The Baltimore Sun will be in attendance — stay tuned for live coverage of the entire weekend and the awards, themselves). Two Maryland-connected nominees are also up for James Beard Media awards, which spotlight excellence in food storytelling: a Washington Post article by reporter Tim Carman on an Eastern Shore grocery store fight fraught with racial tension, and a Saveur article by Clarksville-based writer Laila El-Haddad, on how she keeps her aunt’s Gazan recipes alive after she died in an Israeli airstrike.
In the meantime, as Wolf prepares for the big night, she looks forward to Chicago — just 10 miles from where she spent the majority of her childhood — to relive old memories, and, with hope, make some new ones.
“My first great eating experiences happened in Chicago, and I’m going, basically, back to where I grew up,” she said. “It’s a little bit full circle for me.”
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