Tag Archives: Massimo Bottura

Unique international top restaurant chef shuffle kept top secret!

hufflA unique culinary event, or rather 37 of them, took place almost simultaneously around the world last Thursday, whereby 37 of the world’s best chefs swapped their kitchens with those of another chef. The Grand Gelinaz! Shuffle dinners were sold out, reports Fine Dining Lovers. Unfortunately Africa was excluded from the global culinary event.

On its website Gelinaz! is described as a collective of international chefs, which pushes boundaries, performing food, and takes risks. They are hungry to discover new cultures, and to exchange knowledge. Rather than repeat themselves and their dishes, they explore the unknown. They zoom into ‘the beauty of nature, its elegant chaos and unending recreation‘. It is the fifth such event to have been held in the past two years. Each chef had to arrive in the swap city three days prior to the dinner, and was not allowed to bring ingredients from his/her home country. An 8-course menu was to be prepared, with the assistance of the staff of the restaurant,

Guests booked for the Shuffle dinners at identified restaurants, but the identity of the chef cooking for them on the

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Mark Moriarity of Dublin inaugural S.Pellegrino Young Chef 2015!

imageLast week the whole of Cape Town, if not South Africa, was rooting for Chef Angelo Scirocco of The Chef’s Warehouse in the S. Pellegrino Young Chef 2015, representing Africa and the Middle East, but it was not meant to be.  Chef Mark Moriarity from Dublin won the title in the inaugural competition, which received 3000 entries from Continue reading →

Four of ten S. Pellegrino Young Chef 2015 Africa/Middle East finalists from Cape Town/Winelands!

Grand Provence Darren Badenhorst's - San Pellegrino rabbit dish LRNot only talented Young Chefs from South Africa, but also some of our top celebrity chefs will be involved in judging the best S. Pellegrino Young Chef in the Middle East and Africa, taking place in Milan from 25 – 27 June.  Cape Town and the Winelands have four of ten Young Chef nominations for the judging region, and one celebrity Chef international judge.  A total of 3000 Young Chefs entered the Young Chef competition globally.

The four Cape Town and Winelands Young Chef nominees, having to be under the age of 30 years to qualify, are the following: Continue reading →

Noma back as top World’s 50 Best Restaurants! The Test Kitchen Best in Africa and ranked 48th!

World's 50 Best Restaurants logoThe eagerly awaited 12th The World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards was held last night at The Guildhall in London, and the Top 50 Restaurants were announced. Restaurants ranked 51st – 100th were listed on the Awards website, which crashed just after the Awards ceremony!

The initiative of Restaurant magazine in the UK, and using 900 judges from around the world, a total of 6552 votes were cast to vote for the world’s best restaurants.  The world was divided into 26 regions, chaired by an expert for that region.  Tamsin Snyman heads the Africa panel of 36 members, who had to eat at 4 local as well as at 3 international restaurants to cast their vote.  No score is required – the vote is purely for the best restaurants they ate at, and must be presented in ranked order.  Every year 10 panelists step down per region, to be replaced by new ones.   For the first time in seven years Snyman did not attend, for family reasons.

The biggest surprise was that Noma in Copenhagen went back to its number one Continue reading →