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.

Momofuku is the debut cookery book from David Chang, a young Korean-Amercian chef based in New York, who has been dubbed one of the hottest chefs in the world, and the hottest in New York.  Buy the US version of the book here, and the UK version here.

Chang is chef-owner of Momofuku Noodle Bar, Ko – which has two Michelin stars – and Ssäm Bar – ranked 26 in the S Pellegrino World’s 50 Best Restaurants.  It was Chang’s Pork Buns that brought him fame and forture, and he still does not underrstand why this shoudl be the case.

“Every ticket started to have a pork bun on it,” he recently told The Guardian newspaper as he described his rise to Michelin stardom. “Four people would get four orders of pork buns. They’re only pork belly sandwiches, and usually people are so afraid of fat. I didn’t understand it. It’s not like we reinvented the wheel.” He shrugs.

Written with New York Times food critic Peter Meehan, the new book is a collection of recipes from all three of Chang’s New York restaurants.

Momofuku is Japanese for “lucky peach”, but it has been suggested that the name is a nod to Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant noodles. Chang’s cuisine is heavily influenced by Japanese cooking styles as well as other Asian flavours and the recipes are littered with some lesser-known ingredients such as kochukaru (Korean chilli flakes) and wakame chazuke furiake (Japanese rice seasoning).

At the beginning of the book, Chang shares his thoughts on the perfect ramen (Japanese broth and noodles) and provides a recipe outlining the construction of the dish: from the noodles and the broth, to thepork belly and slow-poached eggs. Also included are details of his most popular dish, the Momofuku pork bun – a home-made, white bun stuffed with braised pork belly and topped with hoisin sauce.

As you make your way through the book, the recipes become more complex with the likes of shaved foie gras, lychee and pine nut brittle; pig’s head torchon; and the delicate soft-cooked hen egg stuffed with caviar and served with onions and potato.

The introductory notes for each recipe provide the story behind the dish and give a peek into Chang’s creative process. The narrative is as colourful and as outspoken as the chef himself, while the recipes – which are complex and precise – capture his unique style of cooking, which Chang himself describes as “bad pseudo-fusion cuisine”. He manages to combine Asian and American flavours, as well as making meticulous use of French technique alongside a dash of molecular gastronomy.

Colour photography by Gabriele Stabile provides an insight into the operation of Chang’s restaurants, as well as an idea of how the finished dishes should look.

If you liked this, you’ll love these:

Growing Up in a Korean Kitchen: by Hi Soo Shin Hepinstall

Eating Korean: From Barbecue to Kimchi, Recipes from My Home  by Cecilia Hae-Jin Lee

Fusion: A Culinary Journey by Peter Gordon

DESPERATE telly chef Gordon Ramsay’s entire career and business empire is hanging by a gossamer thread.  Only David Beckham can save his fortune and his reputation.

Gawd-awful Gordon’s father in law has dramatically quit the management of the holding company which runs the Ramsay restaurants allegedly owing it over £1m. Ramsay’s wife Tana is distraught, but is standing by her husband, as she did when Ramsay had the alleged affair  - though even that is now looking like it was a clever subterfuge to mask quite a different story (more of that another time).Gordon has brought in Dragons’ Den star Peter Jones to help stop his beleaguered restaurant empire turning to toast. But his master stroke will be a new business venture togethwer with football star David Beckham that is set to keep the cashflow coming in to service the mega-debts run up by Tana’s dad.

In an emotional meeting, he begged Jones to help rescue his sinking company which is a massive £17.8 million in debt.

Hell’s Kitchen star Ramsay, 43, made his sensational move after a week in which his family has been torn apart by the financial disaster.His devastated wife Tana, 36, has left the country to stay with their friends the Beckhams in America after Ramsay blamed her father Chris Hutcheson—his long-time business partner—for bringing his empire to the brink of collapse.

“Gordon is a TV star,” said the News of the World. “He’s not got any experience in building an empire. He’d left that to his father in law. Now he’s paying for his decision. The company’s a complete mess.”

The chef demanded that dad-in-law Hutcheson, 62—who became his mentor after he started dating Tana at 16—quit as chief executive of Gordon Ramsay Holdings last week as the pair’s relationship turned toxic.

Restaurants across the globe have flopped, been sold off or closed altogether as the business nosedived with millions in investments written off. A string of top staff also quit. Ramsay—-worth £50 million in 2008—quickly dropped off Britain’s Rich List.

Our insider said: “Gordon blames Chris for the state the company is in. There’s a chance they’ll never speak again.”

It has emerged that Hutcheson took legal loans from the business totaling nearly £1.5 million. Yet before he got involved with Ramsay’s business, he was temporarily banned from acting as a company director after running up a £900,000 tax bill in 2003.

“Tana is in bits about this. She had to cope with Gordon’s affair and now her dad has put the family under immense strain.” Tana certainly looked strained as she dined with Posh and Becks at a Japanese restaurant in Los Angeles on Friday night and made calls on her mobile.

The Beckhams are also planning to help in a high profile bid to rescue Gordon’s business reputation.

Former England ace David will team up with the chef to open a pie and mash shop in London. But it is Jones, 44, who is the key to Ramsay’s survival. The self-made businessman made his fortune after setting up his own business Phones International Group in 1998. By 2005 its turnover was £150 million.

The two held crisis talks at new London restaurant Tinello—doing well and not owned by Ramsay.

HOW Ramsay’s restaurant empire went downhill:

Royal Hospital Road: Turnover down 1.5%, net profits down 9.5%

Claridges:Turnover down 4.6%

Maze/Maze Grill:Turnover up 44.4%

Boxwood:Turnover down 16.6%

Petrus:Closed September 2008 (new Petrus since opened)

La Noisette: Trading ceased January 2009.

The Narrow:Net loss £134k.

Murano:Profit-making.

Plane Food:Profit-making.

Foxtrot Oscar:Loss-making.

Devonshire: “Not lived up to expectations”. Ceased trading August 2010.

York &Albany:”Revenues not been as envisaged”.

” Prague: Closed February 2009

Versailles: Closed February 2009.

New York: Ditched, no longer owned.

Florida: Ditched, no longer owned.

West Hollywood: Ditched, no longer owned.

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’.

All over America, the TV show  Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution has sparked hundreds of ideas and events based on the same principles as his show.

***Danville’s Children’s Choice is taking a page out of Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution,” with a series of classes on cooking whole, healthy foods, from homemade pasta to handrolled sushi. The classes run through Aug. 7 in the Children’s Choice kitchens at 569 San Ramon Valley Blvd., Danville. For details, visit www.choicelunch.com.

***The school district in Crown Point Indiana will institute a variety of healthy eating programs beginning next school year as part of a recent push, inspired by first lady Michelle Obama and celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution” TV show, to make school food as healthy as possible.
In April,the School Board increased the prices of lunch and breakfast for the first time since 1999 to provide more fresh fruits, vegetables and whole grains and less processed food.
Once the next school year starts, the chefs plan to return to the schools to chat with students and see how well their recipes are received.

***Brook Burke’s travel show meets Oprah’s talk show meets Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution Reality Show, with a ‘Unite the World’ global peace, yoga, lifestyle, humanitarian, and environmental sustainability theme.
Dashama’s Mission: To educate and inspire the viewers about global unity, encourage them to get involved in eco-tourism to lend a hand or send donations to each village or region that we visit, as well as involving them directly through a 10 minute yoga session (yoga, meditation and centering exercises that they can do to connect within.) Dashama will be offering real and effective techniques to help the viewers and families selected to transform their lives, over come addictions, and awaken to their best lives right now.
Celebrity guest appearances will add spice and appeal to all audiences. Those who already practice this lifestyle may include: Russel Simmons, Alicia Silverstone, Christy Turlington, Woody Harrleson, Leonardo Di Caprio, Jennifer Aniston, and Gwenyth Paltro.

*** In SF’s South Bay, tweens and teens can learn the kitchen ropes at the Professional Culinary Institute of California this summer. A bakeshop camp for tweens and teens, for example, includes not just cupcakes, but also homemade marshmallows, eclairs and cream puffs. And a kitchen basics class explores the delicious world of fried chicken, jerk chicken, pho and spaetzle. 700 W. Hamilton Ave., Campbell; www.professionalculinaryinstitute.com.

***Chow Bella’s weeklong summer camps in Lafayette include a Mediterranean food fest that includes baklava, hummus and thin-crust pizza; a forkless wonders week with kebabs, mini turkey meatballs, chocolate bonbons and other kid-friendly finger foods; and an all-day buffet that includes DIY omelets, crepes and dessert classes. Founders Grove, 584 Glenside Drive, Lafayette; http://www.chowbella.net.

***Belmont’s Kids Culinary Adventures hosts weeklong summer sessions for all ages, including an Ace of Cakes camp for teens, a Green Eggs and Ham camp for young grade schoolers, and a barbecue extravaganza for tweens. 951 Old County Road, Belmont; http://www.kidsculinaryadventures.com.
(box) And San Jose’s Cucina Bambini offers camps for kids on such themes as “Around the World in 5 Days,” and an appetizer class for teens that includes dips, rolls, avocado egg rolls and tuna tartare on crispy wontons. 1041 Lincoln Ave., San Jose; http://cucinabambini.com.
Dashama is an internationally known yoga teacher and author who has been teaching this holistic lifestyle for years, incorporating yoga, meditation, diet, and sustainable living, globally through the internet, books, and instructional DVDs. This show will expand her currently popular internet reality TV series.
To show your support of this wonderful holistic lifestyle TV Show, please do the following:

• Click on this link: http://myown.oprah.com/audition/index.html?request=video_details&respons…
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