New figures reveal that hotels nationwide enjoyed another strong month in July. The future of hospitality jobs in the UK could be looking up, particularly with the Olympics now only 10 months away.

Data from PKF Hotel Consultancy Services states that room occupancy in London was up by 0.6 per cent on last year, to 92.5 per cent, while the average room rate increased by 6.1 per cent to around £163.

Results in other major UK cities were equally promising for those seeking hotel jobs, with occupancy rising by 5.7 per cent in Manchester, while average room prices were also up in Leeds and Edinburgh.

Robert Barnard, partner at PFK Hotel Occupancy Services, said London hotels had seen particularly strong trade in July, but warned that August may not be able to repeat this performance.

“.....Unfortunately the figures may reflect a different picture as the riots which occurred during the month could have a negative impact on hotel bookings,” he explained.

London Cocktail Week, now in its second year, is the trade event for professional cocktail practitioners. London Cocktail Week (LCW) events will focus around one pop-up space in Shoreditch – the ‘Trade Hub’ – where all seminars, master classes, meetings and mingling can take place.
Centered around two photographic studios, Studio One will become a pop-up bar and meeting space – serving drinks to all those wearing a ‘trade’ wristband (available online at LondonCocktailWeek.com). Studio Two will house the ten official London Cocktail Week seminars. These seminars will be hosted by some of the best-known faces in the drinks world and tickets are on sale via the website.
Founder of London Cocktail Week, Simon Difford says: “London is home to some of the world’s best bars and most skilled bartenders who will take centre stage for ten days in October as the most respected drinks professionals – from master distillers to brand owners and global bartending greats – descend on the city for a series of events, seminars and master classes.
“This year, London Cocktail Week promises to be bigger and better with consumer events supported by a high-profile PR campaign and extended Cocktail Tours to drive traffic to the 100+ partnering bars across the city. In addition we are delighted to be working alongside The Whisky Exchange Whisky Show and RumFest. Both these events will add depth to our existing schedule and put London firmly at the centre of cocktail excellence. We believe this event will provide a great boost for the industry as a whole by encouraging high standards in cocktail bars and raising consumer interest in quality spirits and liqueurs.”
For further information and a full event timetable, visit www.LondonCocktailWeek.com

Hank Shaw—author of Hunt, Gather Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast” (Rodale, 2011, $26)—is on an unusual book tour: Part marathon, part gastronomic adventure, part tent revival, he’s crisscrossing the country, preaching the gospel of wild food. He’s leading foraging walks in Portland, Ore., and Seattle and has a few traditional talks at bookstores, but mostly he’s partnering with chefs who embrace the idea of cooking with the ingredients that surround them and are willing to craft wild-food menus inspired by the book.

Mr. Shaw was born into a foraging and fishing family. “My mom grew up in the Depression in Massachusetts,” he said, “so part of her chores were to dig the clams for chowder, to pick the berries and nuts and things that were around where she grew up. My dad’s side, he’s a big fisherman but he’s also a rabid bird watcher. He made it a habit of being able to identify every bird within a 100- mile radius.” Mr. Shaw grew up in New Jersey and recalls that each year his family would “scrimp and save” in order to rent a cottage on Block Island, off the coast of Rhode Island. Those days were filled with wild food. “We’d pick blackberries, blueberries, we’d get wild grapes, we’d go tread for clams. Back home in New Jersey, [we’d pick] wild onions, which grow in the grass pretty much everywhere.”

Grazing on the edible landscape was a passionate hobby, but besides relatively short stints on a clam boat and working as a line cook, it never was a job. Mr. Shaw worked for 19 years as a political reporter for newspapers. Then, in 2007, he created a blog, “Hunter Angler Gardener Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast,” where he wrote about foraging, fishing and hunting (a skill he’d picked up as an adult), as well as how to cook these wild foods. He’d never planned on blogging for a living or writing a book, but America’s political scene grew angrier and uglier, and the blog became more and more successful. After winning a James Beard Award, the offers began to pour in.

“Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast” is meant to help people slow down and see the edible world around them. It’s not a field guide or a how-to fishing or hunting manual. Instead it explores some of the most rewarding wild foods—the ones that taste the best—offers some information on how to find them and provides a wide variety of recipes to make use of them. Sections of fishing and hunting likely will seem more intimidating to some readers, but Mr. Shaw focuses on demystifying the basics, and these recipes are easily adaptable to more prosaic proteins; for example, you can substitute domestic rabbit or even chicken for squirrel in braised Squirrel Aurora.

“The reason I wrote the book, the core thing I’m trying to do, is to help people realize this is entirely doable within the confines of a normal life,” said Mr. Shaw. “You don’t have to live off the grid. You don’t have to be a survivalist.”

He largely is motivated by how delicious these wild foods are, very often much more flavorful and interesting than their domestic counterparts. That’s largely why so many chefs are drawn to them as well. “Everybody wants to do something original and creative,” he said, “If you’re using standard ingredients, pretty much every flavor combination has been done already. What if you introduce new ingredients?”

As he planned his tour, he learned that he had a thriving readership among professional cooks, which led to the idea of book events as dinners.

Derek Stevens, executive chef of Eleven Contemporary Kitchen, was one of them. An avid fisherman, he also enjoys foraging. “It’s nice now because I have kids and I can take them mushroom hunting,” he said. “My son found his first morel when he was 3 years old.” Mr. Stevens has been a longtime reader of the blog and also followed Mr. Shaw on Twitter.

The two men came into more direct contact after Mr. Stevens posted a picture on Twitter of a dish he’d made—local asparagus with a poached egg and duck-fat hollandaise—and cited Mr. Shaw as the inspiration. He later suggested that Eleven would be a good setting for a book tour dinner, and Mr. Shaw added Pittsburgh to his list.

Mr. Shaw jokingly calls this book tour “noma on the road,” a reference to Rene Redzepi’s Copenhagen restaurant, one of the driving forces behind today’s wild-food movement. “It’s more than just seasonal,” he explained. “It’s finding what is wonderful precisely where you live and exploiting it while it’s ripe and then moving on.”

Eleven’s menu highlights specialties of the region and emphasizes seasonality, and the restaurant regularly works with foragers, but the dinner for Mr. Shaw will take that local focus to a different level, said Mr. Stevens. “People talk about local food—it’s fantastic and all—but you look at morels and chanterelles and pawpaws and wild lettuces, it doesn’t get much more local than when you’re talking about things that are actually indigenous to the area.”

The Oct. 5 dinner will include foraged ingredients such as pawpaws (a fruit indigenous to this region), mushrooms and shagbark hickory nuts, as well as farm-raised edibles such as dandelion greens, duck and venison.

While the chef planned his menu several weeks ago, last-minute changes are certain. One of the challenging and exciting aspects of working with wild edibles is that adaptation and creativity are essential. Mr. Shaw, Mr. Stevens Big Burrito chef Bill Fuller plan to forage locally for ingredients the morning of the dinner, and Mr. Stevens still is working to track down a few of the more unreliable items. But whatever he comes up with is certain to be a unique and delicious taste of Western Pennsylvania.

Madrid – Phone company Telefonica and world’s top chef Ferran Adria today announced a 4-year agreement to refurbish his restaurant El Bulli and turn it into the top food laboratory globally.

The agreement will see Adria taking part in a series of activities taking place in some of the world’s major cities, including: Miami, New York, London, Buenos Aires, Berlin, Mexico, Madrid and Barcelona. These will involve creativity training courses; meetings with executives and clients; and conferences including a strong technological and innovative component, in both content and form.

Telefonica’s wll finance the transformation of ‘El Bulli’, Adria’s restaurant in the Costa Brava, which will reopen its doors in 2014 transformed into a totally different space. ‘El Bulli’ was rated the world’s best restaurant between 2004 and 2009 and Adria recently announced his intention to close it for two years and transform it into a unique ‘laboratory’, which will become an international landmark and a continuing source of inspiration for creative and innovative people.

During the signing of the agreement, Ferran Adria said: ‘the idea is to transform, once and for all, the relationship between creativity and society through the use of new technologies, which will facilitate sharing the progress made and day-to-day achievements as they happen. An intellectual challenge in which having a partner like Telefonica is nothing short of essential’.

In the words of Luis Abril, General Technical Secretary of the Chairman’s Office; ‘this agreement will allow us to make the new ‘El Bulli’ into the best creative laboratory in the world, combining innovation and new technologies in communications and knowledge ‘. ‘Telefonica and Ferran Adria’, added Luis Abril, ‘are both visionaries, leaders in their respective fields. They have both proven their capacity and willingness to act, to move from the realms of possibility and imagination into something tangible and real, as real as the alliance that we are now forging’.

A delightful unexpected dish, was on the menu when brilliant American superchef  Wolfgang Puck was at his 20.21 restaurant at the Walker Art Center, Minnesota.

The restaurateur, celebrity chef and voice of Chef Smurf in an upcoming Smurfs movie,  launched his Open Bar & Grill, an outdoor addition to already-existing 20.21 restaurant, because “people in Minnesota love to eat outside,” he confided.

And he signed copies of his latest cookbook, “Wolfgang Puck Makes It Easy (He SO does).

“Is Kelsey Grammer a Republican? I didn’t know that,” said Puck, who noted that politically, “I go both ways,” he said in that charming Austrian accent.

But he’s married to one—Gelila Assefa Puck, a clothing designer and philanthropist. She’ll instantly get the T’s fashion joke, although Gelila doesn’t seem like a woman who ever wears T-shirts. www.tinyurl.com/2dwx7xz .

Gelila has heightened Wolfgang’s interest in fashion. “She always comments on the fashion,” Puck said, sharing his wife’s remarks about the blue, one-shoulder Peter Soronen gown the First Lady wore to the state dinner for Mexico’s president.

“She didn’t wear it right. This one was too tight up here [he gestures to the bodice and breast areas],” he said, paraphrasing his wife. “She wants to be her fashion consultant.”

I thought the dress was fine and the hair much better—I don’t like the First Lady’s forehead exposed—but everybody’s entitled to an opinion.

“Exactly,” Puck said.

This should give them something to talk about when their worlds meet, as both Puck and Obama are on the same page of the cookbook these days with his emphasis on healthful, inexpensive dining and the First Lady’s mission to fight childhood obesity.

Celebrity chef John Burton Race seems to be more fond of women than ever. Despite having a girlfriend – his former mistress who bore his love child – he has been spotted on an intimate outing with a female friend.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1286307/John-Burton-Races-recipe-trouble-hes-spotted-arm-woman.html#ixzz0qoWIFD3J

The Fat Duck restaurant has won yet another prestigious award to keep its three Michelin stars company on Heston’s mantlepiece. But this time it is a staff member, not the super chef himself, who has merited the prize.

The restaurant’s head sommelier, Isa Bal was named Best Sommelier in Europe by l’Association de la Sommellerie International (ASI)

The annual competition, which took place in Bulgaria last month, saw entrants from 30 countries going nose to nose for the title.

The competitors were judged on three main skills: decanting technique, ability to indentify wine varieties and vintages, and flair for recommending a suitable wine to different dishes.

With Bal – and his conk – safely back in Bray, plonk remains firmly off the menu and nobody will sniff at the wine list. Another triumph for Heston and co. Now, which wine complements fat duck..?