David Nicholls

Keeping a hotel at the forefront of fine dining without outsourcing its flagship restaurant is a rare feat these days. But that’s exactly what this year’s Chef Award winner, David Nicholls, has achieved. Under his guidance, not only has one of London’s premier hotels maintained a Michelin star in its haute cuisine restaurant for four years, but it’s done so while keeping ahead of the pack with its banqueting operation, too.

Mention that you’re going to a reception or dinner at the Mandarin Oriental Hyde Park and you’ll get one reaction: “Best canapés in town: can you sneak me in?” To those in the know, it’s no surprise that David Nicholls has spearheaded the resurgence of the Hyde Park’s in-house cuisine since he took the role as its executive chef and food and beverage director in 1997 – little more than a year after the Mandarin Oriental bought the property in 1996.

When he was lured over to the Hyde Park from London’s Ritz, his previous employer, he stipulated that his responsibilities stretched beyond the kitchen into food and beverage as a whole: his way of ensuring stability and vision in the hotel’s food offering. As a consequence, immaculate product sourcing and rigorous service quality standards became the norm – thanks, of course, to the skill of Nicholls and the talented team of chefs he has gathered around him.

Those chefs include Chris Staines, who heads up the team at the one-Michelin-starred Foliage restaurant under Nicholls. And it’s part of the secret of Nicholls’s success that he has allowed others, like Staines, to blossom and develop their skills. Training the next generation, as our judges noted, is very much Nicholls’s “thing”. So passionate is he about handing on skills to young chefs that he persuaded his bosses at the Mandarin Oriental to launch a culinary training scheme. “There’s a question mark over the talent of tomorrow – both in a culinary sense and a food and beverage sense – and we want to help remedy that,” Nicholls has said.

His baby is not just a lip-service educational scheme, though. Under it, six young chefs will go through a three-year apprenticeship, spending months in all the hotel’s kitchen sections, acquiring banqueting and fine-dining cooking techniques, even being sent to specialist chocolatiers, bakeries, butchers and fishmongers to gain the skills they need to become fully-rounded chefs. The scheme kicks off this month.

“Over many, many years he has supported the industry in a great way,” commented Anton Edelmann, one of the judges. Nicholls’s own skills, incidentally, are rooted in classical French cuisine and were acquired both at Michelin-starred restaurants in France and the UK, as well as some of our grandest London hotels such as the Ritz and the Waldorf. But Nicholls hasn’t been content to ossify in his past. He’s kept on top of the Asian influences currently in vogue (just try the canapés) and successfully drawn-up an Orientally-infused menu for the Hyde Park’s Café restaurant. Singapore noodles? Thai red curry? – head to Knightsbridge.

“He’s classically trained but keen to learn new things and he doesn’t get anywhere near as much recognition as he should,” commented another judge, Heston Blumenthal. He added: “He’s been offered some pretty high-powered positions within the Mandarin Oriental group, which he’s turned down because he doesn’t like to lose touch with what’s happening in the kitchen. His dedication is a great example.”

The judges

• Heston Blumenthal, chef-proprietor, the Fat Duck, Bray, Berkshire
• Anton Edelmann, principal chef, Directors Table
• Matthew Fort, food and drink editor, The Guardian
• Philip Howard, chef-proprietor, the Square, London
• Anton Mosimann, chef-proprietor, Mosimann’s, London

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