Four Pittsburgh chefs are semifinalists for this year’s prestigious James Beard Foundation Awards.

Bethany Zozula of 40 North at Alphabet City on the North Side, Wei Zhu of Chengdu Gourmet in Squirrel Hill and Kate Lasky and Tomasz Skowronski of Apteka in Bloomfield are semifinalists in the category of Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic. Lasky and Skowronski are nominated as a pair.

The chefs are among 20 total nominees in the Mid-Atlantic region, which includes Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Virginia and Washington.

Zozula was formerly executive chef at the now-closed Whitfield in the Ace Hotel in East Liberty.

Zhu, who opened Chengdu Gourmet in Squirrel Hill in 2014, is a return semifinalist in the Best Chef: Mid-Atlantic category. He was a chef/partner at the former China Star in McCandless.

Lasky and Skowronski worked together on a pop-up restaurant in 2010 before opening the vegan-menu Apteka in 2016.

The James Beard Foundation’s Restaurant and Chef Awards were established in 1991 as one of five separate recognition programs of the awards.

Restaurant and Chef Award winners will be celebrated at an wards ceremony June 13 at the Lyric Opera of Chicago. Those nominees, along with honorees for Leadership, Lifetime Achievement Award and Humanitarian of the Year Awards, will be announced March 16 in Scottsdale, Ariz.

Nominees for the James Beard Foundation Media Awards will be released April 27 in New York City.

The awards are named for the late American chef, cookbook author, teacher and television personality. Beard was a pioneer of television cooking shows, as host of “I Love to Eat,” a live show that aired on NBC in 1946-47. In 1955, he founded The James Beard Cooking School in New York City and Seaside, Ore.

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