Birmingham's Pryce is Whitbread winner

A second-year student from Birmingham College of Food, Tourism & Creative Studies has been named the winner of the Whitbread Group Design A Dish competition, which took place earlier this month, in association with Merrychef and Unilever Bestfoods.

Gregory Pryce, a 21-year-old chef currently training at the Renaissance Marriott Birmingham hotel, prepared a dish of Chinese loin of pork with egg noodles. His success secures him a place on the Craft Guild of Chefs 2002 Culinary World Championships team, which will compete in Luxembourg this year. The team's captain, Nick Vadis, who is also executive head chef at British Airways' Waterside head office, was chairman of the judges for the Design A Dish cook-off.

Runners-up in the students' event - which was held at Unilever Bestfoods' Innovation Centre in Crawley, West Sussex - were Thomas Frew, who is on placement at Grillbar in Bristol, and Matthew Thorne, a second-year placement at TGI Friday's, also in Bristol. They both win a week's work experience at the Sheraton Park Lane hotel, London, under the guidance of executive chef Andrew Bennett, who was also a judge for the competition.

The competition was created specifically for students on the Whitbread Chef Modern Apprenticeship scheme, which was launched in September 2000. (By this September, 24 colleges in Britain will have joined the scheme.)

Students were briefed to design a dish that could be used in the Whitbread-branded restaurants where they worked. The recipes were then tested and amended at the students' respective colleges in a workshop environment before a shortlist of finalists was selected. At the cook-off, competitors were asked to cook one dish based on vegetarian, pork or lamb for four covers in one-and-a-half hours.