The World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards 2012 took place at the Guildhall in London last night, with the best chefs, writers, critics and personalities in the industry gathering for this prestigious occasion.
We struggled to keep the table stocked up, with guests enjoying products such as Middle White Pork, fresh and sweet Formby Asparagus and Artisan Somerset Cheddar, showing that for the best chefs in the world, traditionally-made, artisan food is still their first choice.
The awards ceremony itself also saw the first ever Slow Food UK Award being given to Steirereck in Vienna, and Chef Heinz Reitbauer. The award was given to the restaurant within this year’s ‘50 Best’ list which embraces concepts of sustainability and promoting edible biodiversity with an outstanding commitment to small producers and the environment.
Chef Heinz said: “I care about doing my own small part to promote and protect the great edible biodiversity of my country. I introduce long forgotten flavours of our landscape by promoting products from Slow Food’s Ark of Taste from Austria. I have been working with Slow Food Vienna for many years and am delighted to receive this very special award.”
For more information on Steirereck go to http://steirereck.at/en/restaurant
Here at Slow Food UK, one of our missions is to get traditional British food, lovingly made by artisan producers, back on the table through our Forgotten Foods programme. So we tasked ourselves with creating something innovative, eye-catching and engaging, to showcase the programme – which supports a variety of top-quality British food that is in danger of going out of production – at food events and festivals.
The result is the ‘Slow Food UK Forgotten Foods Roulette Table’, which we showcased with great success at this year’s prestigious World’s 50 Best Restaurant Awards. The table, designed and built by Central St Martins Alumni The Decorators, highlights the critical ‘eat it or lose it’ position of some of these Forgotten Foods, while encouraging guests to sample a wide variety of top-quality produce.
Check out this time lapse film of our Slow Food UK Roulette wheel in action!