Who will win a James Beard Award for 2023?

The eyes of the restaurant industry turn to Chicago Monday night when the James Beard Foundation hands out its annual awards honoring chefs and restaurateurs at a gala often equated with the Oscars of the food world.

Philadelphia is sending six finalists, mostly familiar names in the Beard universe, in four categories: Hanna and Chad Williams of Friday Saturday Sunday (outstanding restaurant); Ellen Yin of Fork, a.kitchen+bar, and High Street (outstanding restaurateur); Amanda Shulman of Her Place Supper Club (emerging chef); and, among the five finalists for best chef, Mid-Atlantic, Chutatip “Nok” Suntaranon (Kalaya), Dionicio Jiménez (Cantina La Martina), and Jesse Ito (Royal Izakaya).

This will be the first trip to the red carpet for Friday Saturday Sunday and the Williamses (the restaurant was a semifinalist last year) and for Jiménez, who was the subject of a recent series of articles by Inquirer critic Craig LaBan and photographer Jessica Griffin, who followed the Mexican chef back to his home state of Puebla.

Here’s a look at the finalists:

The name Friday Saturday Sunday is etched upon Philadelphia history as one of the vanguards of the city’s early 1970s dining renaissance. It was founded at 21st and Rittenhouse Streets under the unwieldy name Friday Saturday Sunday & Thursday Too by photographer Weaver Lilley and his friends in 1973, the same year as Astral Plane and Frog.

In 2015, Lilley struck a deal with Chad Williams, chef at Tela’s Market in Francisville and a veteran of the Jose Garces universe (from his days at El Vez and Alma de Cuba, and former chef de cuisine at Amada), and his then-fiancee, Hanna Whitaker, also a Garces veteran. The couple set about re-creating everything but the name, even moving a staircase. It took them nearly 18 months, and they celebrated the completion by getting married in the kitchen.

In his initial 2017 review, LaBan praised “sometimes edgy but always delicious and ultimately approachable updates to some basic food groups.” FSS was a finalist for outstanding restaurant in 2022.

“We’re excited and terrified at the same time,” Chad Williams said Friday.

Twenty-seven years ago, Ellen Yin, bored as a health-care consultant, rode down Market Street in Old City on the Raleigh three-speed bike that was an 11th birthday gift from her dad back home in Central New Jersey. She spotted the wide storefront at 306 Market St. and told her Wharton classmate Roberto Sella that this would be the perfect location for their restaurant.

It was and still is.

Tines and times have changed, but Fork has stayed true to its excellence and professionalism since its opening in 1997. Yin has been a force in Philadelphia dining, cofounding the Sisterly Love Coalition to champion women in hospitality and leading relief efforts during the pandemic as well as raising money for anti-Asian discrimination through the Wonton Project. With partners, including chef Eli Kulp, she went on to open a.kitchen on Rittenhouse Square and High Street, once next door to Fork and now at Ninth and Chestnut Streets. She is a five-time finalist.

As LaBan wrote last year: “Restaurant goers, myself included, often focus disproportionately on chefs. But Yin is the primary visionary here, and she has been the heart and soul of Fork.”

No culinary school for Amanda Shulman. She grew up a food-obsessed Connecticut transplant to the University of Pennsylvania, throwing dinner parties at her apartment. An as a junior majoring in political science and journalism, hoping to become an international correspondent, she interviewed Marc Vetri’s father, Sal, at Vetri Cucina for a profile.

She ended up sticking around to help cook staff meal. Then came kitchen jobs with Vetri in Philadelphia and Las Vegas, at Joe Beef in Montreal, and briefly at Momofuku Ko in New York, followed by what was intended as a two-month residency in a former pizza shop at 1740 Sansom St. Her Place Supper Club, all of 24 seats, blew up into one of the most coveted reservations. She was an emerging-chef semifinalist last year.

Then came her second restaurant, the new My Loup at 2005 Walnut St. with her fiancé, Alex Kemp, also a chef.

“Like father...” was the headline on LaBan’s 2011 profile of Matt and Jesse Ito, written as the Cherry Hill-raised Jesse Ito was coming into his own as a sushi chef at his father’s renowned Fuji restaurant, first in Cinnaminson and then in Haddonfield. “Sushi was always there, all the way back,” he recalled in 2018. “I can’t remember when it wasn’t, because my father would just bring it home.”

The Itos sold Fuji in 2016 to concentrate on Royal Izakaya, which opened in Queen Village in December 2016 with business partners Stephen Simons and Dave Frank. As Matt Ito scales back his work, Jesse Ito oversees the city’s most-sought-after dining seat: the sushi counter, where he turns out omakase tasting menus.

This is his fifth Beard nomination.

Dionicio Jiménez arrived in Philadelphia in 1998, among the early arrivals from San Mateo Ozolco, the town in Puebla that many Mexican Americans in Philadelphia call their birthplace. He washed dishes during the day at ChinChin, a Center City restaurant, and worked at night at Vetri, four blocks away. When Vetri sous chef Michael Solomonov left to go into the restaurant business with Steve Cook, they tapped Jiménez to be chef-partner at Xochitl, the Mexican restaurant they opened in 2007 on Head House Square. Three years later, Jiménez was named chef at Stephen Starr’s El Rey in Rittenhouse, and in 2015, he became a U.S. citizen.

Last year, this chef’s chef opened his own restaurant, Cantina La Martina, a cheery corner bar-restaurant at D Street and Kensington Avenue, that he and others hope will help start a revitalization of Kensington.

Chutatip “Nok” Suntaranon has lived her life all over the world. Raised in Yantakhao in southern Thailand, she was a flight attendant-turned-Italian restaurateur in Bangkok (2003) who moved to Philadelphia with her husband, Ziv Katalan (2010). She took classes in New York at the French Culinary Institute and got a degree (2011) French cuisine, interning with Jean-Georges Vongerichten.

With a now-former partner, in 2019 she opened the BYOB Kalaya — her mother’s name (say it “KAH-lay-yah”) — in the Italian Market. Kalaya was named the country’s top newcomer by Esquire and Food & Wine.

In a partnership with Defined Hospitality (Suraya, Condesa), Kalaya moved to sumptuous quarters four times the size at 4 W. Palmer St. on the Fishtown-Kensington line earlier this year.

LaBan and photographer Monica Herndon visited southern Thailand with Nok last year. She was a Beard finalist last year, as well.

(Disclosure: Some current Inquirer staff members have served on or are part of the James Beard Awards voting body.)