The winner is Sunil Menon of Leigh in Lancashire, a development chef at Patak's, the people who make curry sauces. Reach for one of these and you now know an award-winning chef will have had a hand in cooking your dinner. Menon only came to Britain just over a year ago, from the Oberoi Hotel group in Mumbai. His winning menu – not yet available to eat at home, but we can hope – included lamb bhuna, Kerala chemmeen pull (prawn curry with tamarind), and aloo shimla minch puneri (potato and green peppers).Professional rivalry, oyster openers, poultry shears, vegetable parers and all other sharp implements were put aside a couple of days ago to honour winners of the Guild of Food Writers awards.
We all want to be applauded by our peers, confident that they aren't swayed by commercial success but know dedication, research, knowledge, and talent when they read it. (How could they, then, have overlooked the Truffler?) Congratulations and recommendations from the highest foodie quarters went to Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall for The River Cottage Cookbook, Gordon Ramsay and Roz Denny for Just Desserts, and Anthony Bourdain – him again – for A Cook's Tour as Food Book of the Year. Fuchsia Dunlop received the Jeremy Round award, named after The Independent's founding food writer who died tragically young, for her dazzling Sichuan Cookery.Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, whose Food: a History was pipped to one of the awards by Bourdain was in discussion with The River Caf? Ruth Rogers and author Mich? Roberts as part of the Festival Hall's Feast: Cooking and Culture series of talks around the subject of food. The event was chaired by our restaurant reviewer Tracey MacLeod, and the panel's contributions were varied: in one of her short stories Mich? Roberts had imagined the obsessed former student of a TV chef using her butchery, cooking and dining skills as an expression of love; Ruth Rogers evoked the theatrical aspects of running a restaurant; Fernandez-Armesto also put the case for cannibalism. The next talk in the series is on Thursday, when Sam and Sam Clark, the husband and wife chefs who started Moro restaurant, explain how travels in Spain and North Africa inspired them.
The following Wednesday, 20 March, film director Gurinder Chadha talks about how food binds minority cultures together, and shows clips from her film What's Cooking and her forthcoming Bend it with Beckham. Both talks are at the Voice Box in the Royal Festival Hall, tickets £5 from the box office (020-7960 4242).With characteristic gusto, Fernandez-Armesto denounced the vegetarian brother- and sisterhood that adopts the moral high ground and ignores the enjoyment of eating Vegetarians, feel free to barbecue him. Then do your bit to improve the image of vegetarianism by making nominations for this year's Vegetarian Society Awards, votes for which are being canvassed (0161-925 2000, /awards). One of last year's winners was some Quorn product, but others, such as Terre ?erre restaurant in Brighton, were the sort that give the V-sign a good name.
The more nominations, the better this year's results will be, and the more the likes of Mr Fernandez-Armesto will be proved wrong.. Best of British is a tiny corner shop in Road Town on Tortola, the sleepy capital of the British Virgin Islands. Its chest freezers are crammed full of fish fingers, Micro Chips and Tesco's Neapolitan ice cream. The shelves are stacked with what, in the Caribbean, are rarities: Heinz salad cream, curry pastes and Marmite. Like countless other shops around the world, it sells home comforts to the local expatriate community. "I tend to buy silly things like Bird's custard and Jaffa Cakes," says Claire Standen, an English scuba-diving instructor. "But what I miss most are curries and the convenience of buying ready-made meals, especially as it's really hard to get hold of fresh vegetables here." Best of British is a tiny corner shop in Road Town on Tortola, the sleepy capital of the British Virgin Islands.