The field of culinary arts is constantly evolving with considerations of sustainability and environment impact coming ever more to the fore.

One clear growing trend is for vegetarian and vegan alternatives in our daily diets, with more and more “meat substitute” products appearing on supermarket shelves.

To help inspire out students and challenge their creativity, we hold a regular vegetarian, fine-dining lunch in our Swiss Room restaurant in conjunction with our industry partner Planted.

A Swiss company that has become one of the market leaders in plant-based, meat substitutes, Planted has a wide product range which can be used as replacements for beef, chicken, pork and other animal foodstuffs.

Using these products, our young chefs were challenged to come up with an entirely meat-free, three-course, fine-dining menu to serve to our training restaurant guests.

To assist with the judging, we were delighted to welcome Planted’s Head Chef Francois Poulain into the restaurant to provide feedback to the students and assess their dishes.

The quality coming out of the kitchen was of a very high standard with students producing plates that included cauliflower steak with eggplant, chicken curry Kabuli with planted wellington and mushrooms and a ginger and lemon sorbet with thyme pound cake.

Our guests, including Chef Francois, were really impressed with both the concept and execution of the menu and the creative way in which the students had utilised the plant-based ingredients.

A fantastic exercise to both broaden the students’ culinary horizons and examine the importance of sustainable food practices to today’s market.