The Editor's Hospitality Blog

Males across the hospitality industry will wince at the news of the release of a new multimedia recipe book entitled the Testicles Cookbook. According the Telegraph, the book, which is subtitled Cooking with Balls, features such delights as testicle pizza, testicle ghoulash and white wine testicles. The recipes' descriptions of mincing, slicing and boiling testicles in hot oil are enough to make any man's eyes water.

Author Ljubomir Erovic, dedicates the book to his grandmother "for introducing me to the delicious world of testicles". According to Erovic, the testicles of bulls, pigs, turkeys, and even stallions and ostriches, can all be turned into tasty, testosterone-rich meals.

Chefs who manage to master the art of cooking testicles might wish to enter the World Testicle Cooking Championship, whose URL, ballcup.com, is clearly a product of the Ronseal school of web addressing.

All in all, it's a concept that brings a whole new meaning to meat and two veg.

Tonight, Simon Hulstone, chef-patron of the Michelin-starred Elephant restaurant in Torquay has taken home the title of Knorr National Chef of the Year and the £10,000 prize money.

The announcement, made at the dinner at the Sheraton Park Lane hotel, comes after a three-hour cook-off at the Restaurant Show at London's Earls Court earlier today.

Eight chefs competed in the cook-off in which they had to produce a four-course meal from a selection of ingredients from a mystery basket, which included grey mullet, rabbit, pears, apples and blackberries.

Clark Crawley, sous chef from Barclays Wealth in London took second place, followed by David Kennedy, chef-proprietor of the Black Door restaurant, Newcastle upon Tyne in third.

This is Hulstone's fourth attempt at winning the title.

On winning the Knorr National Chef of the Year, Hulstone's dad, chef Roger commented: "It's about f***ing time!"

Nothing like fatherly love... 

Check our our video from the cook off and from the awards ceremony

By Katherine Alano

I had lunch today in a fancy London restaurant that I shall not name, and was amused to witness goings-on at the adjacent table, where two elderly gents asked the waitress to decant their bottle of burgundy.

She duly returned with a decanter, into which she upturned the bottle to vertical and began to slosh wine. Alarmed, one of the gents grabbed her arm and levelled the bottle, explaining that a little more delicacy might be in order. At this, the waitress tilted the bottle so close to horizontal, that the wine dribbled down it and onto the floor. Her coup de grace was to empty the sediment from their pricey bottle into the decanter, to the horror of the two old boys.

I don't believe for a moment that the poor standard of wine service the men received was the fault of the waitress. Rather, her employers should be ashamed of themselves for expecting guests to pay top whack for good wines, but not being prepared to invest in effective staff training. They could do far worse than to check out Caterersearch's wine channel and seek out our series of wine masterclasses penned by former Gordon Ramsay Holdings executive head sommelier, Ronan Sayburn.

Today's Evening Standard claims coffee chain Starbucks wastes 23 million litres of water a day through its policy of leaving taps running to avoid staff passing on germs by turning them on and off.

Starbucks executives will find all sorts of useful information in our Green Month channel about saving natural resources - though I must admit it never occurred to us to include "don't run taps all day across your 10,000-strong chain" in any of our 'top tips' list.

I spent an enjoyable morning and lunch at Mosimann's private dining club in Belgravia today, filming a video Q&A with legendary chef-restaurateur Anton Mosimann for imminent publication on Caterersearch. The club celebrates its twentieth anniversary this year.

Before his arrival, I assumed the role of chef Mosimann, sitting in the great man's seat in order to get camera angles right. Not that passing guests were fooled - the absence of an immaculate silver moustache on my top lip and colourful bow tie around my neck gave the game away.

Anton outlined his culinary philosophy, embodied in his cuisine naturelle cooking style, and recalled the variable standard of food he encountered when he arrived at the Dorchester Hotel as its youngest ever Maitre Chef de Cuisine, in 1975. One particular bugbear of his was the excessive amount of gelatin used. Once, he said, a waiter dropped a smoked salmon terrine that he was carrying down a staircase. "The waiter fell over, the plate smashed, there was broken crockery everywhere, but the terrine just kept on bouncing up and down on the spot".

With Halloween only four weeks away, now is probably a good time to start digging out some interesting pumpkin recipes - and where better to start than on Caterersearch's recipe channel?

Among the channel's 1400 recipes, you'll find: pumpkin tortellini, crushed amaretti, mostardadi Cremona by Bruno Loubet; Anthony Flinn's pumpkin and muscovado toffee ravioli with apple and mascarpone mousse and cardamom ice cream; and white chocolate delice, pumpkin and cardamom choux buns, bitter chocolate sorbet by Robert Thompson.

At the Catey winners' reception at the Dorchester Hotel last week, talk turned to where the restaurants, hotels and other hospitality operators that have won the industry's ultimate accolade, a Catey, keep their statue.

David Sharpe, Managing Director of the London Eye and winner of this year's Leisure and Tourism award, told me that his Catey took pride of place in the trophy cabinet within the ticket office. Sure enough, when I dropped by the following morning, there stood Catey, looking resplendent and in plain view of the 3.5 million people that ride the eye each year.

Meanwhile, the rumour is, that there are so many Cateys lined up along the front desk at the Vineyard at Stockcross, that guests are having trouble communicating with reception staff.

Have you ever won a Catey? If so, where do you keep it? Office? Mantelpiece? Dining room? In a safe in a Swiss bank? Beside the pond in your garden (hope not)? let us know or - better still - send us a pic of your Catey.

The concept of personal responsibility featured heavily in the inaugural Ken Hom Lecture, delivered by Lord Chris Patten at Oxford Brookes University earlier this week. The annual lecture will form a central plank of Oxford Gastronomica, a vehicle for debating society's dysfunctional relationship with food and drink, founded by the university's Head of Hospitality, Donald Sloan. Lord Patten painted a grim picture of global water shortage, depleted grain crops, global warming and badly-allocated development assistance. But he concluded that "there are many things we can and should do, as individuals, to make a difference. What we eat and drink can have a considerable impact on what other people can eat and drink". 

Given this glimmer of hope, it is encouraging to read the Food Standards Agency (FSA)'s positive progress report on the joint commitment of the big five contract caterers to helping their customers make healthier workplace eating choices. 

In January, Aramark, BaxterStorey, Compass Group, Elior and Sodexo, along with suppliers Brakes and 3663, signed a commitment to provide healthier meals in the workplace. All have progressed in such areas as developing new recipes for popular dishes to use ingredients lower in fat, salt and sugar; increasing training for chefs and kitchen staff on healthy cooking techniques; and offering customers more information on the nutritional content of food and promoting healthy eating messages.

As Lord Patten said, globalisation is about choice. By enabling their customers to eat more healthily and, by extension, more responsibly, our caterers are helping them to make informed meal choices that just might make the tiniest difference to the world.

This morning, I went to the official London Games website to sign up to the Volunteer Programme. Having inputted my personal details onscreen, imagine my surprise when a box flashed up informing me that I had already registered to be a volunteer and had logged a password with the system.

Now, anyone who knows me will know that I am more than capable of creating a profile on a site and then forgetting that I had ever done so. On the other hand, it does strike me as odd that I should have had zero correspondence from the same event organisers who, four years from now, will be relying on peope like me to herd our global guests around the capital.

At a time when there is so much talk about how we can improve the standards of customer care around the hospitlity industry, I confess to feeling rather miffed at having been left, ignored, on the back burner until it suits the games organisers to mobilise me. meanwhile, I await my fitting for myOlympics 2012 waterproof jacket and beanie hat ...

In it's early days I wasn't exactly compelled to watch Masterchef, the BBC2 series, but I did find it easy, Sunday afternoon viewing if I happened to be in. 

Over the past few years - as it has slowly increased the involvement of the professional trade - I have found that I have enjoyed it more and more. But I wouldn't say I plan my social diary around it - unlike some of my friends.

In the last week, however, I feel like I've been receiving subliminal messages from the makers of Masterchef. Last week I attend the London Restaurant Awards, where John Torode presented an award with recent Celebrity Masterchef winner Liz McClarnon. Yesterday, at a bash in the 'burbs, a woman was telling me that she records every programme and religiously watches it in bed (I bet her husband loves that).

Continue reading "Masterchef - love it or loathe it?" »