WTF Is Going On with Kukbuk’s Złote Ostrygi Awards?

Recently, the entire Polish gastronomy community practically exploded over the new “Złote Ostrygi” awards from Kukbuk magazine, one of the few professional food media outlets still left in Poland.

The reason? A Reel posted by Kukbuk, in which Martyna Chomacka, the chair of the awards jury and the face of the awards, presented the top three nominees in the “Best Sweet Dish” and “Best Savoury Dish of the Year” categories. Let’s leave the nominations themselves aside – the funniest part was that Martyna Chomacka herself was among the nominees.

How did the chair of the jury also become a nominee for the award? That’s a remarkable question in itself. But there’s something much more important here: how a poorly organised event can damage the reputation of many of the people involved in it.

Because people aren’t idiots. They quickly dug up evidence suggesting that many of the recipes nominated for the award were, politely speaking, borrowed from or inspired by foreign colleagues, while Martyna somehow managed to integrate into a Reel “very similar to one by Brandon Gouveia” an advertisement for Makro as well.

Honestly, I’m not an expert in copyright law and can’t say where exactly the ethical line between “allowed” and “not allowed” lies, but from the outside, the whole thing doesn’t look particularly good.

Janek Mońka has collected a huge amount of information and comparative videos on the subject. I’ll leave a link to his account in the post description – in his Highlights, under “Ostrygi”, you can find a whole lot of videos on the subject.

People quickly checked who was on the jury and started rubbing their hands in anticipation of the remaining nominees. 

Because the jury’s expert council includes, for example, the owner of Wandal (Wandal itself, by the way, was nominated in the “Restaurant of the Year” category), as well as the owner of Baken and the co-owner of the Ferment restaurant group.

Are these good places? Absolutely. Do Wandal, Baken and the restaurants of Ferment Group deserve to be recognised by the awards? Very much so.

But when everything is done the way it was done by a professional food media outlet, then – to my great regret – the shadow falls on everyone involved. Especially on Instagram, where people are quick to reach for their pitchforks.

The fact that Kukbuk representatives alternately hid and closed comments on the post, while not responding to people’s questions at all, clearly didn’t help the situation.

So what would have helped?

Exactly: clear, sensible rules for every single part of the process, written out in advance. That’s the bare minimum. This is exactly where work on any awards should begin – and I know what I’m talking about. I organised something very similar in 2012–2015, albeit in another country

Okay, so you invited a whole bunch of media personalities and presented every member of the jury on social media – why? So that everyone would know exactly who to throw stones at?

And the stones will come flying – especially if the awards rules page doesn’t say a single word about whether jury members can vote for their own establishments and recipes, how the voting process works, who determines the longlist, and so on.

For God’s sake, you’re putting the very people you’re using to promote the awards in the firing line – and all of this in an extremely small professional gastronomy community.

Is anyone going to benefit from this? Doesn’t it look like an insiders’ club from the outside? And if you offer different companies the opportunity to sponsor specific categories, shouldn’t that put an extra responsibility on the organisers to make sure that everything in those very categories is in order?

As for the voting platform (people were supposed to suggest restaurants and individuals who could make it into the top three), I don’t even want to get started. It’s just sad. There was no schedule showing the leaders in real time, and there still isn’t one.

At the moment, the only functioning button tells you that votes for preliminary submissions were accepted until 14 June 2026, yet you can still vote there – as many times as you like. I had absolutely no problem casting two votes for two different people in the same category, one minute apart.

Theoretically, voting for the nominees from the already selected top three should now be underway. But I simply couldn’t find a way to access it from the website: there were no links to it anywhere.

And then came the fatality: late that night, Kukbuk published an official announcement saying that Martyna Chomacka was stepping down as chair of the jury, while also stating that no violation of the rules had taken place.

All the videos featuring Martyna were also deleted. Every single one of them.

And given that she was the person who announced all the nominees from the top three, it is now impossible to understand not only where exactly you’re supposed to vote for someone from the top three, but also who is actually in it. Bingo!

On the other hand, the announcement did reveal that jury members were not allowed to vote for themselves. Thanks for letting us know – just a liiiiittle late.

A restaurant award is important. Having an independent one, free from vested interests, is even more important. The only question is what exactly the award is supposed to achieve.

For me, there has always been only one goal: developing the market. Respect, recognition, competition, excitement (and possibly even money earned by the organisers) – all of that is great, but it’s merely the result of that growth.

Whether there will be any growth as a result of the “Złote Ostrygi” gala ceremony – we’ll find out very soon.

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