You hear a lot about the James Beard awards—who is nominated, who wins, etc. But what does it mean, really? Given the hushed sense of awe surrounding those awards, you’d think that it changes a chef’s life to win one.

But does it?

I asked Jason Wilson—the chef and owner (with wife Nicole) of Crush —who won Best Chef Northwest in 2010. This is what he had to say.

1. You get to go on all-expense-paid trips to amazing places.
A luxury cruise around the Caribbean on a ginormous yacht and the the Pebble Beach Food and Wine festival are two places that Jason Wilson has been invited to cook this year. Owning a restaurant is a low-margin, highly laborious affair, of course. And Wilson is pretty frank about the fact that he’s not making much money doing it. These food and wine events are a free vacation for his family, and he gets to cook with his heroes.

2. Your restaurant is not suddenly packed every night of the week.
Wilson said that, particularly in the months following last year’s awards, people assumed securing a table at Crush was well-nigh impossible. Nope. “It doesn’t put butts in seats,” he told me. Especially when you’re a fine-dining restaurant and there’s a massive recession going down.

3. You do get more respect from your culinary students…but you can’t tell them dirty jokes anymore.
Wilson teaches classes on sous-vide cooking to culinary students at SCCC. He says he’s noticed a shift in perception, culinary students take him more seriously when they hear about the award. But he says he used to joke around with them a lot, and now he feels like he needs to act more professionally—in a manner befitting a Beard winner. (From what I’ve witnessed of Mario Batali, not all Beard winners feel this way.)

4. In some ways, it’s bad to win.
Or, I should say, in some ways it’s better to get nominated and then not win. You only get to be Best Chef Northwest the one time. But you can be nominated year after year so long as you lose. And when you are nominated, you get lots of press and attention from your peers. It’s basically the best free PR ever. Once you win, you have to make your own noise.

5. You will not immediately open another restaurant unless you were going to anyway.
Wilson has one restaurant and a catering business (in addition to consulting gigs). Ethan Stowell, who is nominated this year, has four restaurants. Maria Hines, who won in 2009, has two. At the time she had one. Matt Dillon, Stowell’s competition this year, has two. The point is, having a Best Chef Northwest award (or not having one) is unrelated, directly at least, to your business growth. It may make you more attractive to investors, but doesn’t necessarily mean they’re lining up outside your door, fists stuffed with large bills.

6. You get to vote.
Did you know this? Beard award winners get to vote for who wins in subsequent years. That would be fun. Not as fun as a packed house every night of the week, but fun.