This is one question that keeps popping up around food awards: Does greatness and fame follow awards or do awards chase greatness? It is an existential question that may never get answered.

Name just about any iconic restaurant in the country, and you’ll find that its fame came much before the culture of food awards. From Karim’s and Al Jawahar in Delhi to Britannia in Mumbai, to Pune’s Dorabjee & Sons, which has been around since 1878 and is still owned by the same Parsi family, to Kolkata’s Swadhin Bharat Hindu Hotel, the ultimate pice hotel, and Eau Chew, the country’s oldest continuously running Chinese restaurant, to Hyderabad’s Shadab and Bangalore’s Vidyarthi Bhawan and Kundapur’s Shetty Lunch Home, none of these restaurants – and many more – has owed its success to food awards. A more recent example is the undiminished popularity of Big Chill, Delhi’s least awarded yet most successful pasta-and-burger restaurant.

So, why do we need food awards if restaurants become popular and gain longevity without getting one? Well, the restaurants that have endured the test of time appeared on the dining scene when there was no clutter, no information overload, no social media influencers finding ‘hidden gems’ that the whole world seemed to know about except them. These ‘heritage’ restaurants, as I would like to call them, have survived across generations because of consistently positive word of mouth and continuing customer loyalty.

It’s however different at a time when in just about any city a new restaurant, bar or cafe is opening every day, and when just about anyone with a mobile phone equipped with a ‘pro’ camera is turning into a food ‘content creator’. It then becomes important for a reputed media house to gather together a group of well-informed and well-meaning people, and ask them to rate restaurants and honor the best among them.

Pause and think about this. Would Semma ever be known outside New York City but for the global media hype over its understated helmsman, Chinnalagu Vijaya Kumar, winning the coveted James Beard Award for Best Chef, New York State. He may not have the social media fan base of, say, a Vikas Khanna, but Semma, and not Khanna’s The Bungalow, has earned a Michelin star for five years in a row, and is at the top of the New York Times list of the Big Apple’s top 100 restaurants.

Credible food awards are particularly important in a country that now has a burgeoning food service economy, currently valued at between $80 billion and $85 billion (and growing!), but no organized system of ratings, such as the Guide Michelin or Gault Millau, or the Gambero Rosso and The World’s 50 Best Restaurants.

In such a market, the purpose of credible food awards, curated by people bringing with them the heft of experience, is to cut through the clutter of Instagram’s fake heroes and recognize and honor the real gems. Without food awards, we would have never learned about Indian Accent (formerly led by Manish Mehrotra, who has never ever chased celebrity status and stardust), Masque (first, Prateek Sadhoo, now of Naar fame, and then Varun Totlani), Tresind Studio (Himanshu Saini), Indienne (Sujan Sarkar), Gaggan (Gaggan Anand) and Ga (Garima Arora).

More recently, restaurants such as Papa’s (Hussain Shahzad), The Table, Inja (Adwait Anantwar) and Farmlore (Johnson Ebenezer) have gained the attention they deserve because of their elevation to the 51-100 extended list of Asia’s 50 Best. When a credible media house or agency shortlists restaurants for awards, they at once create new heroes to feed the imagination and roving palate of epicures.

There’s nothing more gratifying than seeing a restaurant get to rise above social media clutter and get its place in the sun because of a credible award. Come Monday, June 15, the NDTV Food Awards promise to establish a new pecking order for India’s restaurant sector. It’s time for us to move away from Instagram darlings and roll out the red carpet for the real heroes.