Hospitality & catering students from Warrington Collegiate are celebrating after taking home the silver medal at the Welsh International Culinary Championship.
The college’s Chef Lecturer, Scott Surtees, captained the team of three catering students, Russell Wood, Jack Vance and Anthony Goble.
The event, which took place in Llandrillo, was the first competition entered by the team and saw them go up against regular competition-entering colleges, cooking and serving a four-course meal in 90 minutes.
Jack, who is in the final year of his level 3 qualification in professional cookery, said: “Coming second against professional catering colleges was amazing. It’s the first time we have entered a competition and we really showed off our ability and what we can do.”
Russ said: “We all worked incredibly hard as a team. I think we definitely surprised the other colleges – they didn’t expect that standard of food from us.”
For Anthony, who has only been studying hospitality & catering since September, the experience was out of this world.
Anthony said: “It was incredible. The entire experience was just fantastic and will look fantastic on all of our CVs when it comes to applying for jobs after college.”
Chef lecturer Scott Surtees is no stranger to competitive cooking, having entered similar competitions during his tenure.
Scott said said: “I am so proud of Jack, Russ and Anthony. For us to come in second place and win the silver medal at our first ever competition is just incredible. We did ourselves proud and I think we surprised quite a lot of the other competitors who didn’t realise just how talented our students are at Warrington Collegiate.
This goes to show just how far we push our students and that what we are doing at Warrington Collegiate and what we are teaching these young chefs, is right.
To come second, competing against very large catering specialist colleges is a fantastic achievement!”
A special evening of celebration will take place in Buckley’s restaurant on Wednesday 29th March with the team’s competition menu being served up.
To book, please call Buckley’s on 01925 494 378 or e-mail [email protected].
The dishes prepared and served by the team were:
Twice-baked Welsh goats cheese soufflé with textures of onion
Cured and flame-torched mackerel with flavours of cucumber, radish and pickled ginger.
Local farm chicken cooked two ways with truffled leeks, celeriac puree and garlic potato
Lemon posset with white chocolate, earl grey fluid gel and black sesame tuille.
