Competition round-up

Pastry chefs ace Excellence awards All six pastry chefs competing in this year's Academy of Culinary Arts' Annual Awards of Excellence have achieved their goal and gained the accolade. In addition, four chefs and five waiters have reached the required skill standard and walked away with the Academy's seal of quality.

The yearly awards, split into three categories - chefs, pastry chefs and waiters - are aimed at professionals under the age of 26 and require competitors to achieve a preset standard of excellence by scoring 70% or better in a series of tests of their culinary and service skills in their specialist areas.

The 2003 finals - held at Thames Valley University and Le Gavroche in London last month - saw 32 young chefs and waiters striving to gain the Academy's required standard (12 waiters, 14 chefs and six pastry chefs). The 15 who were successful will receive their awards at a presentation lunch to be staged at the end of May at London's Savoy hotel.

At the lunch, the highest scorers in each section will be announced, and this trio will be rewarded with a scholarship worth £1,500 and an additional £500 prize, courtesy, respectively, of sponsors the Savoy Educational Trust and the British Hospitality Association.

Those achieving the 2003 Annual Awards of Excellence are:

Service: Rodolphe Bertin, Almeida Restaurant, London; Nicholas Bouffay, Le Gavroche, London; Suzanne Drinkel, the Square, London; Rose Marie Jourdan, Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, Great Milton, Oxfordshire; Sophie Metais, Gleneagles, Auchterarder, Perthshire.

Kitchen: Peter Eaton, Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, Great Milton, Oxfordshire; Robert Goodman, Ashdown Park hotel, Forest Row, East Sussex; Boel Horsvall, L'Escargot (Picasso Room), London; Goran Kovacevic, Claridge's, London.

Pastry: Andrew Ditchfield, House of Commons, London; Daniel Fletcher, Mandarin Oriental hotel, London; Debbie Gagen, Sloane Club, London; Hetti Hillman, the Dorchester, London; Chris Nurse, Carlton Towers, London; Craig Teasdale, Cliveden, Berkshire.

Norwegian Student Challenge James Abernethy, an 18-year-old student at Southampton City College, has ensured that the city is making the headlines for more than football this year by winning the Norwegian Seafood Focus Student Challenge.

Abernethy's offering of pan-fried fillet of cod with pancetta and Parmesan risotto, aubergine purée and basil and spinach froth managed to beat off the challenges of nine other young chefs in this second staging of the event, organised by Norwegian Seafood in association with the Craft Guild of Chefs.

The competition, open to full- and part-time catering students, required finalists to devise an original recipe (with a cost limit of £2.50 excluding fish) for a two-cover main course using Norwegian cod, haddock or prawns, or any combination of the three. The chefs had 45 minutes in which to prepare, cook and serve their dish in the cook-off, held at the Birmingham College of Food, Tourism and Creative Studies.

Abernethy wins a gastronomic and work-experience trip to Oslo, plus lunch at Jean-Christophe Novelli's restaurant at Brocket Hall, Auberge du Lac, in the company of second-placed Ryan Swift of Birmingham College and third-placed Kalli Symmonds of Westminster Kingsway College in London.

The judging panel included Novelli, Andreas Antona of Simpson's in Kenilworth, and Kjetil Gundersen of the Norwegian Culinary Institute. It was chaired by the Craft Guild's own chairman, David Mulcahy.