Highlights from the year so far...

L'atelier in the City

Today L’atelier des Chefs opened its new cookery school in St Paul’s.  This is the second London outlet and 21^st worldwide, an impressive achievement when you consider the company only started in 2004. 

The location was chosen due to L’atelier des Chef’s MD Tom McNeile, who used to work in the City, believing that they could use some guidance from the cookery school.  To support the opening we conducted some research into the eating habits of 1,000 City workers to get to the bottom of how they view cooking and food. 

The results confirmed what L’atelier already knew with 69% admitting that they spent less than 30 minutes preparing their evening meal.  It is clear from the research that people who work in the City lack time, confidence and cooking skills.

L’atelier des Chef’s St Paul’s is here to help, running two Cook, Eat and Run classes each day at 12.30pm and 1.30pm, as well as a variety of other classes, giving City workers the perfect excuse to escape the office and brush up on their cooking skills.  

L'atelier des Chefs supports Project Ocean

2012 is the second year we have been involved in Project Ocean at Selfridges.  Last year it was with Gulyian, raising awareness about seahorses and marine conservation, this year it is with L’atelier des Chefs, who is showing its support by taking part in the Top Chefs sustainable fish cooking demonstrations in the Selfridges Food Hall.  The first one took place today, where one of their chefs was demonstrating how to cook Gilt Head Bream goujons and Sea Bream with ginger and chilli.  The demonstration attracted quite a crowd and if you missed them this week and want to know how to cook sustainable fish, L’atelier des Chefs will also be demonstrating on the 12 and 16 May from 11am – 3pm.

BBC meets Chinese authors

On Wednesday, the final day of the Fair we hosted filming by the BBC and set up interviews with Chinese authors Xi Chuan and Sheng Keyi. The BBC were also able to capture some of the creativity and literature dialogues between top authors Mo Yan and Marina Lewycka that took place in the morning as well as plenty of supporting footage of the China Market Focus area. 

Reuters interview Tan Yue

Tuesday was a dialogue day, with six taking place in the China Market Focus Pavilion in Earls Court 2. They spanned topics including economics, contemporary art, music and copyright. 

Following the economics dialogue, we set up an interview between Reuters and Tan Yue, Chairman of the China Publishing Group Corporation (CPGC) resulting in this article. 

The contemporary art dialogue was one of the best attended events and didn’t disappoint the large audience as printmaking and calligraphy specialist Xu Bing and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, Hans-Ulrich Obrist discussed and compared the ways in which their education and cultures had influenced their creative endeavours.