On Monday the restaurant industry, a sector that has never won a single award, won its first: the Globie, the inaugural prize of a brand-new awards program, powered by Coca-Cola, created by and for the people who feed you between highways. The winners were announced this week. The ceremony is in November, in Cannes, and the industry is, appropriately, freaking out about a trophy shaped like a small golden planet.
The first-ever Global Restaurant Leader of the Year is Inspire Brands, the company that operates Dunkin’, Arby’s, Subway, Baskin-Robbins and Firehouse Subs, which is to say the award went, in its founding year, to the owner of the American lunch. Shake Shack, the Jollibee Group, Wingstop and AVOLTA were recognized for franchise excellence, menu innovation, global growth, technology and leadership, a list of categories that reads like a mission statement written by a man with a laminated binder, and is, in fact, close to that.
The restaurant industry has long resented the Michelin Guide, the James Beard Awards, and any honor that requires a dining room with tablecloths. The Globies are the industry’s answer to the Nobel, the Pulitzer and the Academy Awards, all three of which take place in Sweden. “I have a Globie,” said a regional operations manager who asked that her name be protected for family reasons. “It lives on the fry station. The health inspector asked about it, and I told him it’s a kitchen fixture. He wrote something down. I’d do it again.”
The awards travel to the JW Marriott in Cannes on the French Riviera, from November 4 to 6, during a leadership conference whose agenda includes “menu innovation,” a phrase that in Cannes will be translated for the first time. The ceremony’s sponsor is the beverage that has been making American fries taste like a decision since 1886. The donuts, one is told, travel in a refrigerated container with the band.
The industry’s reaction has been the reaction of any group that has built its own trophy: total belief. Wingstop, recognized for technology, has scheduled the Globie to be displayed at its headquarters, in a lobby, under glass, near a gift shop that sells a T-shirt reading “Sauce Royalty,” a phrase that has been on the shirts since 2019 and is now, for the first time, technically accurate. Jollibee, the Filipino chain whose fried chicken has conquered more of the planet than the Philippines has mapped, received its Globie with the restraint of a company that has been winning in public for decades.
The Globie is not, it must be said, a prize for food. It is a prize for “leadership,” which in the restaurant industry is a competitive sport played in drive-thru lanes, and the first champion is a company that employs more of the country’s teenagers than the federal government employs adults. It is the most honest award in American culture: nobody pretends the trophy is about the cooking. The trophy is about the fryer, the app, the franchisee in Toledo, the 4 a.m. truck, the donut that crossed an ocean in a cooler, and the industry’s quiet, hard-won conviction that the place where a nation eats fast deserves a night in a ballroom on the Riviera.
The ceremony is November 4. The donuts are in a cooler, with the band, in transit.