What's Shaking? Tastemaker Virginia Miller of World's 50 Best at Bar Betsie with JP Sabatier

Virginia Miller has eaten and drunk her way through more than 30,000 restaurants and bars, and she is now one of the people who decides which ones the world calls the best. On this DC food podcast she explains exactly how that vote works, who gets to cast one, and why so many of her own picks never make the list. We recorded it at Bar Betsie with a cocktail competition running in the background.
Virginia Miller is Academy Chair for The World’s 50 Best Restaurants and for North America’s 50 Best Restaurants, sits on the James Beard Awards Committee, and serves as a lead judge at San Francisco World Spirits and at the American Distilling Institute awards, which she has judged for seventeen years. She has written for more than 60 international outlets and publishes The Perfect Spot, the Substack she started in 2007 as a blog.
Nycci Nellis gets her to walk through the parts of the awards world people usually only speculate about. How many voters there are. How chairs select them, and why a quarter get swapped out every year. What blind spirits judging feels like, closer to a lab than a party. And why she insists there is no single best restaurant anywhere.
Then the show moves to the bar. Bar Betsie co owner JP Sabatier talks about why he and his partners kept circling the Union Market District, how Jane Jane and Bar Betsie were built to feel like different places on purpose, and what a culinary school education actually contributes to a cocktail program. He builds a Love Yuzu on camera, and he and Tom Martinez go head to head on a flavor profile Virginia calls out live.

Watch the whole thing unfold here, or listen in here.