Last year I started placing some of the the Beard nominated restaurants onto a map. I didn’t add all of them. For example, I’m not interested in wine and it takes a not completely negligible amount of time to add each restaurant. I ended up with 33 last year. This year, I think I may have excluded fewer categories and there were also more categories so I ended up with 46. You can see the <a href="http://stuartspivack.com/blog/?p=8">map on my blog</a>. That’s the 2007 restaurants. The heavy lifting technical stuff was handled by Tagzania. Click through to Tagzania and you can see a map for 2006. I also have the Gayot Top 40 from 2006, the Gourmet Magazine Top 50 and the Food and Wine Rising Star Chef awards.

This year I also wanted to conveniently collect the books and magazine and newspaper articles. I made it through all 39 books and 4 magazine articles before my patience finally ran out.

The Beard Foundation should have done this themselves. It’s a waste of effort for them to do it wrong once and then for me to do it (almost) again the right way.

The map is actually helpful when I start planning a trip. In the mean time I enjoy looking at it and being thankful that I don’t live in Wyoming.