Past recipients:

2021 Tienlon Ho writes about food, history, and science, and often where these intersect. She’s the co-author of Mister Jiu’s in Chinatown (Ten Speed Press, 2021), a narrative cookbook about the groundbreaking restaurant and how San Francisco’s Chinatown changed the flavor of America. She’s written for publications including San Francisco Chronicle, Lucky Peach (RIP), California Sunday (RIP), Slate, GQ, and The New York Times, and traveled around Asia and the Americas for Lonely Planet. Her work is anthologized in Best Food Writing and earned the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Gold Award for culinary-travel writing and the 11th Hour Food and Farming Journalism Fellowship. She lives in San Francisco with her husband and two children and works full-time as an attorney. Read more about Tienlon and her writing at tienlon.com.

2021 Esther Mobley is the senior wine critic at the San Francisco Chronicle. Since joining the paper in 2015, she has reported on all the movements of California’s $40 billion wine industry, from wildfires to undocumented vineyard workers to climate change to the rise of natural wine. Since 2018, she has published a weekly email newsletter called Drinking with Esther. Previously, Esther was an assistant editor at Wine Spectator magazine in New York, and she has worked as a harvest intern at wineries in Napa Valley and Mendoza, Argentina. She was named Feature Writer of the Year in the 2019 Louis Roederer International Wine Writers’ Awards. The previous year, she won first place in the California News Publishers Association Awards Print Contest for feature writing for a story about a winery owned by a California cult, and first place for agricultural reporting, for her writing on Napa Valley's land-use controversies. Her work was recognized as the Best Writing on Beer, Wine or Spirits by the Association of Food Journalists in 2017 and 2019. Find her portfolio of work at esthermobley.com.

2019 Soleil Ho has been the San Francisco Chronicle’s Restaurant Critic since 2019, spearheading Bay Area restaurant recommendations through the flagship Top Restaurants series. Ho also writes features and cultural commentary, specializing in the ways that our food reflects the way we live. Their essay on pandemic fine dining domes was featured in the 2021 Best American Food Writing anthology. Ho also hosts The Chronicle’s food podcast, Extra Spicy, and has a weekly newsletter called Bite Curious. Previously, Ho worked as a freelance food and pop culture writer, as a podcast producer on the Racist Sandwich, and as a restaurant chef.

2018 Rachel Levin has written for the New York Times, Outside, the New Yorker, Eater, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is the author of Look Big: And Other Tips for Surviving Animal Encounters of All Kinds, and the coauthor of two cookbooks: Eat Something: A Wise Sons Cookbook for Jews Who Like Food and Food Lovers Who Like Jews and Steamed: A Catharsis Cookbook for Getting Dinner and Your Feelings on the Table, with Tara Duggan. Rachel's first kids' book will be published next year by Phaidon. An essay she wrote for Eater, about grapefruit spoons, was selected for the upcoming edition Best American Food Writing.

2017 Bonnie Tsui  is a longtime contributor to The New York Times and the author of American Chinatown, winner of the 2010 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature. She has written about Michelin street food, Hong Kong's rooftop farmers, and shark fin soup for The New Yorker, California Sunday, and Pop-Up Magazine. Her latest book, Why We Swim, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a TIME magazine and NPR Best Book of 2020; it is currently being translated into nine languages. Her first children’s book, Sarah and the Big Wave, about the first woman to surf Northern California’s Mavericks, was published last year. She is writing a new book about muscle.

2016 Lisa Morehouse is an award-winning public radio reporter, producer and editor. She is currently at work on California Foodways, a county-by-county exploration of stories at the intersection of food, culture, economics, history and labor. For that series, she won national Edward R. Murrow and SPJ NorCal awards, and was named an 11th Hour/UC Berkeley Food and Farming Journalism fellow and nominated for a James Beard Journalism Award. She holds a Certificate in Documentary Arts from Duke University’s Center For Documentary Studies, and helps run workshops there each summer.

2015 Rachel Khong edited a book with Lucky Peach called All About Eggs, published in 2017. Her novel Goodbye, Vitamin, published in 2017, received the California Book Award from the Commonwealth Club. She continues freelance writing and editing. She the founder of The Ruby, a work and event space for women and nonbinary artists and writers. Her second novel is forthcoming from Knopf in 2024.

2014 Jessica Battilana has relocated from San Francisco to Portland, Maine, where she is staff editor at King Arthur Baking Company.  She is currently at work on a second solo cookbook, to be published by Norton in 2023, which will join her first, Repertoire, published in 2018.

2013 Emily Kaiser Thelin is associate creative director at Apple and was previously content director at Blue Bottle Coffee and editorial director for recipes at the organic meal kit delivery company, Sun Basket. Her biographical cookbook about culinary legend and Alzheimer’s advocate Paula Wolfert, Unforgettable: The Bold Flavors of Paula Wolfert’s Renegade Life was published in April 2017, continues to receive accolades and critical acclaim.

2012 Twilight Greenaway is a senior editor at Civil Eats, a daily news source for critical thought about the American food system. She has been writing and editing for the web since 2000. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Salt (NPR’s food blog), The Guardian, the Bay Citizen, Food & Wine, Mother Jones, Gastronomica, Modern Farmer, TakePart, and on Grist, where she was the food editor in 2011 and 2012.

2011 Sarah Henry is the author of Hungry for Change (2018) and Farmsteads of the California Coast (2016). For Running Press, she teamed up with chef Preeti Mistry to co-write her memoir The Juhu Beach Club Cookbook: Indian Spice, Oakland Soul (2017). She has written about food matters for The Washington Post, Plate, Eater SF, San Francisco Chronicle, and Edible San Francisco. Her work has also appeared in the anthology Best Food Writing (2014 & 2015).

2010 Novella Carpenter is the author of two memoirs, Farm City and Gone Feral. She is now the Director of the Urban Agriculture at the University of San Francisco, where she teaches in the environmental studies department, exploring the connections between race and gender in agriculture. She is on hiatus from writing while she finishes her doctorate.

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