Jamie Oliver dinner raises £225,000

Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s annual fundraising dinner for charity the Fifteen Foundation raised £225,000 last week.

The annual event, which took place at the London headquarters of information services provider Bloomberg, supports the Fifteen Foundation, which provides young people from underprivileged backgrounds with work in the restaurant industry.

Jamie Oliver told Bloomberg: “We’re trying to build a training kitchen above Fifteen to help the local community, and we’d like to increase the number of apprentices each year to 45 from about 20 to 25.”

“We need a lot of dosh but it’s not only about the money, and this is a chance for us to tell high-profile people what we’re trying to do. We’re helping kids from tough backgrounds and events like this help us to get to the next level.”

<!– document.write(”); //–>  Guests at the dinner included Boyzone singer Ronan Keating as well as Oliver’s parents Trevor and Sally Oliver.

Sunday Snapshot

Bugs in your food ? No longer a problem it seems. Nowadays they’re even putting bugs in baby food and microbes in your milkshake ! Relax, this is not the latest tainted food scare — it’s a growing trend in foods designed to boost health, not make you sick.These products contain probiotics, or “friendly” bacteria similar to those found in the human digestive system.There are supplement pills, yogurts, smoothies, snack bars and cereals, even baby formula and chocolate. Sold by major names like Dannon and Kraft, they’re spreading like germs on grocery store shelves and in supermarket dairy cases.

Talk about haute cuisine – 125 metres off the ground. One of France’s most decorated chefs is unveiling a revamped Jules Verne restaurant in the Eiffel Tower next month. Alain Ducasse and Sodexho, the French catering services giant, took over management of the tower’s restaurants earlier this year. The iconic Jules Verne restaurant, overlooking Paris from the second level of the 312-metre tower, underwent a makeover that Ducasse said he hoped will attract Parisians and tourists alike.
“Jules Verne should be a restaurant of French tastes, in terms of design and cuisine,” Ducasse said. That means no egg rolls, he added

Rocco DiSpirito presents a cautionary tale for all those would-be celebrity chefs. Sometimes fame plays hard. And it won’t hesitate to take you down, no matter how serious your kitchen cred. So it was with DiSpirito, who in a flash went from culinary superstar to reality TV burnout. But DiSpirito’s story is unfinished. And the moral may yet be that tenacity and talent can triumph.
“I’ve learned a couple important things along the way,” he said recently while cooking from his new book, “Rocco’s Real Life Recipes.” “No. 1, don’t bite off more than you can chew. That’s been a pretty big lesson for me.” These days DiSpirito is chewing far less. His restaurants and television show are gone. His new cookbook got a quiet rollout. And he’s spending time with family and friends while doing charity work.It’s an unlikely formula for a relaunch, and it might just work. For years, DiSpirito was amazingly surefooted. In 1997, he opened New York’s Union Pacific restaurant to acclaim. Food & Wine magazine named him “Best New Chef” in 1999. A year later, Gourmet magazine called him the nation’s most exciting young chef. In 2003, he agreed to star in an NBC reality show, “The Restaurant,” which would chronicle the opening of a second eatery, Rocco’s 22nd Street. A year later his cookbook, “Flavor,” won a James Beard award.Then things crumbled. The show and new restaurant started strong, but soon were shuttered, thanks partly to infighting between DiSpirito and his business partner. Meanwhile, DiSpirito left Union Pacific, and a new cookbook got panned.”I thought our differences could be overcome. In some ways, they were more true to themselves than I was,” DiSpirito said of his business partners from that era. “I should have been honest with myself.”

That Was The Week That Was

In a week when His Gordoness announced the latest Head Chef appointment in his empire was to be a woman his original female protege, Angela Hartnett, spilled the beans on her boss. Poor Angela suffered when she started her career with the stress of being a full-time trainee under Ramsay. Hartnett admitted at last week’s Good Food Show that the stress of being the only woman to get a bollocking in the kitchen from the man himself regularly made her return home to Wales in floods of tears.
During one break for Easter Hartnett admitted to a disturbed night’s sleep dreaming of the restaurant burning down in flames just so she did not have to return to the Hell of the kitchen.
Worse though were her dreams about Marcus Wareing. At the time Waring had the keys to the restaurant and was responsible for its opening on a daily basis. Hartnett confessed that the stress of the job was so much that she would often dream that Waring would never turn up to open the restaurant because ’something unfortunate’ had happened to him on the way to work.
Meanwhile, Wareing, now Head Chef at Petrus in London joined other culinary luminaries in revealing where their favourite meals of 2007 had been – Wareing said “I’d have to say the Dorchester Grill. It’s an inventive cuisine, unique to Aiden Byrne. Great flavors, great execution and he’s taking risks. He served a turbot dish lightly cooked with chilled soup on the side. It’s hard to get good fish dishes cooked well these days.” while boss Gordo punted the food of one of his own chefs : “I’ve got three favorite London chefs: Jason (Atherton) at Maze — he is the most amazing talent, his vibrant food is inspiring; Atul Kochhar at Benares — he’s the spice king, especially his chicken curry; Skye Gyngell at Petersham Nurseries. Her elegant seasonal cooking is wonderful.”
Professor Heston Blumenthal (Fat Duck) recommended “Royal China. I went for lunch with my wife and kids and my mother and father after getting my OBE. The dim sum is great. Also, I remember having a fantastic night at Inopia in Barcelona with Ferran (Adria of El Bulli), his brother Albert (who owns Inopia) and friends. It was great.” while Richard Corrigan (Lindsay House):favoured a London landmark “At Le Gavroche with my wife, Maria. When you’re long in the tooth like me, you want to feel comfortable. Silvano (Giraldin, the maitre d’) could serve me a pork pie with a pint of ale and I’d think it was the best meal. I also like Rowley Leigh’s new place, Le Cafe Anglais.” The Italian greaseball, Giorgio Locatelli gave a typical response “I don’t eat out much in London. I live here in Locanda. One of my best meals was when my wife Plaxy cooked spare ribs. I have to chip in when she cooks Italian because she is English, very English. My other best meals were on holiday in Sicily at Da Vittorio, in Porto Palo.”

Ramsay’s new girl

Leading chefs have welcomed the appointment of Clare Smyth as Gordon Ramsay’s head chef at his three-Michelin-starred restaurant on London’s Royal Hospital Road. Smyth has replaced Simone Zanoni, who has left to oversee the opening of Ramsay’s restaurant in Versailles, France, next year. She will work under executive chef Mark Askew and becomes the first woman in the UK to head up a three-Michelin-starred kitchen.

Lisa Allen, head chef at Michelin-starred Northcote Manor in Langho, Lancashire, said Smyth’s appointment was good for the industry.”This has the potential to inspire more girls to join the industry – and to spur on those of us already within it,” she said.

<!– document.write(”); //–> “It can sometimes be hard for women to work their way up in the kitchen as it’s often a very male-dominated environment. But this appointment shows that if you’re a strong, hardworking person, anything is possible.”

Eyck Zimmer, executive chef of the Lowry hotel in Manchester, said that, while the industry was still mainly male-dominated, there was no reason why women shouldn’t run three-starred restaurants.

“If you have the talent it doesn’t matter what sex you are and I would be more than happy to work under a female head chef,” he said. “There are a lot of women out there who are incredibly talented chefs. We have always known that women make great chefs. I have two women in my kitchen and it’s a much calmer, less hysterical environment as a result,” he said.

“One thing about Gordon Ramsay is that he has a track record of spotting great talent and I’m sure Smyth must be very good. It’s his flagship restaurant and he wouldn’t trust her with the job if he wasn’t 100% sure she could do it.”

A pinch of….

A WELSH sea salt has been named one of the world’s top five gastronomic products by a meeting of some of the world’s finest chefs. The accolade afforded Anglesey’s Halen Môn came from the cream of the world’s Michelin- starred chefs gathering in San Sebastian, in the Basque region of Spain, for the Feria de Gastronomía food festival.

They said the product, which comes from the Menai Strait, had “significantly raised the quality of gastronomy”. Halen Môn has previously been lauded by such celebrity chefs as Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal, and has also featured in the food of world number one- ranked restaurant El Bulli in Spain.

The company said the salt is taken from very pure water under a sandbank in the sea, which has already been filtered by mussels. The company boasts its product is fully traceable, with the initials of the person who picked the salt even printed at the bottom of the containers. Exporting currently accounts for 50% of Halen Môn’s business and it is active in more than 20 markets worldwide, with Spanish chefs appreciating it the most, outside the UK. The salt has joined this year’s elite top five gastroproducts from around the world that include a chocolatier, a cheese maker, a rice grower and an oyster grower.

Pie in the sky

Dinner in the Sky is a new and exciting restaurant concept designed to thrill foodies and daredevils alike.

Enjoying a meal in a restaurant where you can get high quite legally, and safely.

Recently introduced to South Africa from Belgium, Dinner in the Sky is a dining experience where table, chef, waiters and guests are suspended 50 metres in the air on a platform, which is currently situated just opposite Montecasino in Fourways.

Ranked among the world’s Top 10 most unusual restaurants by Forbes Magazine, the platform is slowly hoisted high up into the air by a crane – offering you and your guests total privacy while enjoying this gastronomic experience coupled with spectacular views.

The crane is capable of lifting 90 tons, and as the entire restaurant assembly weighs a maximum of five tons, there’s plenty of safety factor built in. The chairs themselves are shaped like racing car seats and are fitted with a four-point safety harness and bolted in place. Each seat also incorporates a steel safety cable. The equipment and crane are rigorously checked before each event, and the entire assembly has been built according to German TÜV certification norms, one of the toughest safety certifications in the world. Everything, from the seatbelts to the crane, was conceived with an obsessive attention to detail as far as safety is concerned.

S O S

S O S – save our salmon. Celebrity chef Richard Corrigan who cooked Glenarm salmon for the Queen’s birthday last year has urged the Agriculture Minister to find funds to bail out the gourmet salmon company devastated by a huge jellyfish swarm. The industry is still reeling in disbelief after 120,000 organic salmon were stung and asphyxiated to death by billions of small jellyfish, costing the Northern Salmon Company more than £1m.

The Dublin-born chef cooked Glenarm salmon for the Queen as one of the highlights of her 80th birthday banquet last year after he was one of the winners of the hit TV programme, The Great British Menu. “I was really flabbergasted. I am really saddened for them,” he said.”I thought somebody was pulling my leg when they told me. It’s a fantastic product absolutely the best of the best. “It’s up to everybody to gather round and get this sorted. “If it disappears the market will be filled by somebody in Norway or Scotland. This needs to be put right very quickly because the markets disappear so quickly.” Fishmonger Walter Ewing, who is one of the main Belfast suppliers of restaurants sourcing the Glenarm salmon, said the entire Christmas stock has been lost to the attack.

“That was the only salmon company in Northern Ireland – the rest all comes from Scotland,” he said.

“It’s a really good salmon…”

Sunday Snapshot

The town of Lopburi in Thailand celebrated its annual Monkey Festival recently, laying out a lavish banquet for the more than 2,000 macaques that roam freely through it.
Locals believe that providing food for the monkeys, Lopburi’s most famous residents, brings good fortune and prosperity. The feast is also a sort of “thank you” for the animals whose antics entice thousands of tourists to the town every year.
Twenty chefs from some of Bangkok’s top hotels prepared the feast for the primates at the downtown San Pra Kan shrine.
“This is very exciting because I’ve never done this before,” said veteran chef Wuttichart Muadsri. “I’ve only ever served people in a hotel.”
Buffet tables groaned with the feast, which cost more than 500,000 baht ($15,000) and that included a pricey variety of the pungent durian fruit, which the monkeys ate with gusto.

They are renowned across the globe as creators of some of the world’s finest and most popular dishes. But Italian chefs are threatening their nation’s culinary reputation by being more concerned with their fame than cooking, according to the world’s top food guide.
The criticism from Michelin follows Italy’s poor performance in its latest guide, which awards only five Italian restaurants the coveted three-star status – the same number as in the 2007 guide. In comparison, France was awarded 26 three-star ratings, Germany nine, Spain six and Japan eight.
Fausto Arrighi, editor of the Michelin guide for Italy, blamed the attitude of the nation’s chefs. “Many Italian chefs think of themselves a bit too much as stars. They are always on TV, or travelling to competitions and conferences,” he said.
Mr Arrighi said that when inspectors called, chefs were often not working in the kitchen and behaved “like prima donnas”. His words have triggered an outcry in Italy.

The hottest trends on restaurant menus in the United States include small plate entrees, grass-fed and free-range items and alternative red meats and game, according to a survey of more than 1,000 professional chefs.
The National Restaurant Association’s “What’s Hot What’s Not” survey, conducted in October, asked 1,282 chefs to rate 194 foods, beverages, cuisines and preparation methods as “hot,” “cool/passé” or “perennial favorites.”
Topping the list for entrees and main dishes were small plate/tapas/mezze style servings, which 73 percent of participants rated as “hot”. Over half the chefs polled also put grass-fed items, free-range items and alternative red meats and game animals such as buffalo, ostrich, venison and emu on the hot list.
The chefs also gave the nod to preparations that incorporate ethnic cuisines, flavors and ingredients.
Only 33 percent of chefs surveyed rated beef as hot, but 55 percent rated it as a perennial favorite. Similarly, 30 percent rated pork as hot, with 46 percent calling it a perennial favorite.

A restaurant run by a celebrity chef John Torode is among eateries that have been handed low hygiene ratings by environmental health chiefs under a new scheme. Smiths of Smithfield, the Grade II-listed restaurant in the heart of Smithfield Market, is headed by the well-known food writer and presenter John Torode – but it was given a “poor” one star out of five after its council inspection in February this year.Australian-born Torode, who is managing director of Smiths of Smithfield is co-presenter of the MasterChef Goes Large series on BBC Two, which encourages budding chefs.

That Was The Week That Was

Liz Hurley said this week that’s she’s stopped making films because she wants to become a TV chef. God help us. The Queen of Lean teaching us how to eat healthily. Hurley’s idea of a tempting starter is half an olive followed by lettuce leaves – boiled. A friend once suggested that the actress – for want of a better word – uses doll’s cutlery to eat her meals. She told a Brazilian mag: “Maybe you’ll see me in front of the stove soon.”
Meanwhile Britain’s first celebrity chef Mrs Beeton, who surely would have been a TV chef  if she only had been born at the right time, is enjoying a n-ice revival – almost 150 years after her recipes were first published.The Mrs Beeton’s Rediscovered Ice Cream range has been flying off the shelves thanks to a deal with Tesco.Classic English flavours such as Apple Crumble and Guernsey Cream, Old English Toffee and Rum and Raisin are scooping up sales from Ben & Jerry’s and Haagen-Dazs.
A Tesco spokesman said the Mrs Beeton range was on course to sell £3million of cartons in its first year – without any big advertising campaigns.
Another culinary diva came under fire this week from a fellow chef. Gary Rhodes questioned the culinary talents of rival television cook Nigella Lawson, suggesting that her fans prefer her smile to her cooking.Rhodes, who has two Michelin stars and owns restaurants in London, Dublin and Grenada, also said that he found her “ungenuine”.The 47-year-old chef said he saw Lawson more as an entertainer than a chef. He said: “What is it about her – the smile or the sexiness? Is it the cooking? I’m not so sure. Or is it this big-boobed, gorgeous lady that suddenly every builder in the UK is in love with.? “
“Having said that, she still seems to sell a lot of books.”

Don’t turn your back

Celebrity chef John Burton Race’s wife suddenly closed his Michelin-starred restaurant while he was appearing on ITV show I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here!, it emerged today.

Kim, 42, whom he is in the process of divorcing, had shut the £1.2m New Angel in Devon – which she was running in his absence – and sacked the 20 staff.

The workers were given their P45s on Monday night and a notice was put on the door

“It is with deep regret that as of Tuesday 27th November 2007 the New Angel restaurant and rooms will cease trading. Please direct all inquiries to John Burton Race,” it stated.

On learning the news last night, the chef told The Times: “None of that is right. I didn’t know the restaurant was closed or that there was a note in the window. The decision to close the restaurant was not made by me. I have got nothing more to say.”

Burton Race left Kim, his wife of 11 years, a mother of six, for Suzie Ward, 40, and their three-year-old son in March.

A former employee said: “It is rubbish. We were told on Sunday that the restaurant would close just like that. They can’t do it. It is too short notice.”