Beard Foundation to Honor Organic Dining’s First Lady


The James Beard Foundation announced that its lifetime achievement award for 2017 will be presented to Nora Pouillon, 73, owner of Restaurant Nora, which became the nation’s first certified organic restaurant in 1999. The foundation’s awards gala will be held May 1 at Lyric Opera of Chicago.

The award is “bestowed upon a person in the industry whose lifetime body of work has had a positive and long-lasting impact on the way we eat, cook, and think about food in America.”

Though Restaurant Nora remains open, Pouillon has stated her intention to sell it and retire.

Born Nora Aschenbrenner in Vienna, Austria, she and her French husband, Pierre Pouillon, a Voice of America journalist, moved to D.C. in the late 1960s. Reacting to the decidedly unorganic American food scene, she began to teach cooking classes and run a catering business. After opening the Tabard Inn’s first restaurant, she launched Restaurant Nora in 1979 with Thomas and Steven Damato (the latter her longtime romantic partner).

Ben Bradlee and Sally Quinn were early backers of Restaurant Nora, which occupies a snug corner at 2132 Florida Ave. NW, near Dupont Circle. They wrote the forward to her 1996 book, “Cooking with Nora.” Earlier, she had written “Nora: Cooking in a Healthy Way.” Her revealing memoir, “My Organic Life,” in which she talked about her marriage to and breakup with Pierre Pouillon, who died in 1999, appeared in 2015.

A Georgetown resident since she moved from Adams Morgan about 20 years ago, Nora Pouillon was interviewed for The Georgetowner (July 3, 2013) by the late Walter Nicholls, who included her recipe for spicy lemon grass stock. A more recent piece (June 18, 2015) by Peter Murray noted that Pouillon “professes love for nearly all things Georgetown,” though she said she was not a cupcake person.

Restaurant Nora was the venue for President Bill Clinton’s first inaugural party and, in January of 2010, President Barack Obama’s surprise 46th birthday party for the first lady. Pouillon opened a second restaurant, City Café, which became Asia Nora and later closed. She helped start the farmers-market network FreshFarm Markets and is a partner is sustainable seafood supplier Blue Circle Foods.

Founded in 1991, the New York-based James Beard Foundation maintains the James Beard House in Greenwich Village. Beard, long considered the dean of American food writers, died in 1985.

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