Chef Vinnie Cimino’s Wait for a James Beard Award Continues

Vinnie Cimino, chef-partner of Cordelia and Rosy, isn’t coming home with a medal in his second trip to Chicago as a finalist in the James Beard Awards.

The award for Best Chef: Great Lakes went to Jacob Potashnick of Feld in Chicago. 

In 2024, Cimino became Cleveland's first James Beard Award finalist since 2015, when Jonathan Sawyer took home the award for Greenhouse Tavern. Cimino's flagship restaurant Cordelia, located in the former East Fourth Street home of Michael Symon’s Lola’s Bistro, another James Beard Award winner, opened in 2022 and was named Cleveland Magazine’s Best New Restaurant in 2023. In February, Cimino and partner Andrew Watts opened Rosy, a live-fire cooking experience in Hingetown. 

Notably, it took Symon three times to win the award. Sawyer also didn’t win the award on his first or second try — or even his third, finally nabbing it the fourth time. Cimino was a sous chef at Greenhouse Tavern then. Recently, Cimino reminisced about Sawyer's win to Cleveland Magazine.

"When Sawyer won his Beard award, I got to put that medal around my neck and just thought to myself, Damn. it'd be so cool if one of these days I could, you know, have one of these for myself," said Cimino. "Just to be able to have that opportunity to do this and to share it with our folks, it is special. It's one person's name up there, but everybody wants it, and everybody pushes towards it. We set goals for one another. To continue to build everybody up around us, and to be able to actualize those dreams from 11 years ago, and to be able to be in the position to continue to build folks up, it's just so cool."

Hopefully, third time’s a charm for Cimino and the Cordelia team.