Sabrina Ghayour

Born in Iran, Sabrina Ghayour is a self-taught cook and food writer who hosts the hugely popular ‘Sabrina’s Kitchen’ supper club at her home in London, specialising in Persian and Middle Eastern flavours.

Her website www.sabrinaghayour.com and twitter account (@SabrinaGhayour) have become a ‘go to’ for Persian and Middle-Eastern recipes and ingredient wisdom. (more…)

Dhruv Baker

Dhruv Baker, 36,was crowned winner of BBC One’s MasterChef 2010 in April, impressing judges John Torode and Gregg Wallace with his stunning flavour combinations.

Dhruv Baker, 34, was born in Mexico where he lived with his parents until he was four, (more…)

Jason Atherton

Jason Atherton was the first British chef to complete a stage at Spain’s famous elBulli restaurant in 1998.  This invaluable experience laid the foundation for his unique creative style and fuelled his insatiable thirst for culinary knowledge.  having worked under Pierre Koffmann, Nico Ladenis, and Marco Pierre White, Jason joined Gordon Ramsay in 2001 as the executive chef for Verre in Dubai.  In 2005, he returned to London to open maze, launching what would be the most successful brand in the Gordon group (more…)

Galton Blackiston

Galton Blackiston owns and runs Morston Hall in Norfolk. He is the perfect foodie ambassador for Norfolk and believes there is no finer area. He abandoned a professional cricket career in 1979 to take up a career as a chef. He restored an 18th century manor house on the edge of the Morston Marshes and now Morston Hall is a Michelin-starred hotel and restaurant and one of Britain’s leading country hotels. Blackiston appeared in two series of BBC’s Great British Menu and his book Summer Cooking was published in May ’09 by Virgin Books.

Celia Brooks

Celia Brooks moved from Colorado, USA, to London in 1989. Here she forged a career as a chef, food writer and business woman. Starting as a private chef for film director Stanley Kubrick, she went on to author several cookbooks. Celia created her highly successful food tour business, Gastrotours, in 2002, as a platform to share her passion by connecting people with an array of artisan foods around London’s gastronomic hotspots including Borough Market and Portobello. Her extensive knowledge, curiosity and constant engagement with markets and ingredients have firmly established her as a top food expert. She has had seven cookbooks published worldwide in 10 languages and numerous journalistic accomplishments, with columns for The Times, BBC Good Food Magazine and The Evening Standard. While her food knowledge is comprehensive, her cooking style is fundamentally vegetarian, and she is also known as “The New Urban Farmer”, writing about growing to eat, based on her experience tending her North London allotment. Celia has also made multiple TV appearances, a selection of which can be seen here: www.celiabrooksbrown.com/screen.php .

Fiona Cairns

Fiona Cairns is best known for baking the Wedding Cake for the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Katherine Middleton last year. She now presents her own 10 part ITV series ‘Home of Fabulous Cakes’ aired on Sunday afternoons on ITV1, and has authored two books ‘Bake & Decorate’ and ‘The Birthday Cake book’.

Fiona Cairns Ltd began on Fiona’s kitchen table 25 years ago, when Kishore Patel – Fiona’s husband and now MD of the company – spotted the potential of his wife’s beautifully (more…)

Kevin Dundon

Kevin Dundon is the chef/proprietor of Dunbrody Country House Hotel & Restaurant in Co Wexford Ireland.Dunbrody includes a cookery school and spa and is one of Ireland’s Premier Hotels and Restaurants. Kevin also runs two Raglan Road restaurants in Florida and Kansas in the US. Kevin has cooked for many well-known celebrities including the Queen, President Bush and Bono.  Kevin has appeared on television programmes (more…)

Henrietta Green


Henrietta Green is widely acknowledged as the country’s leading expert on Britain’s local and regional speciality food producers, and is on the judging panel of ITV’s 26-part series Taste the Nation. She is a food writer, broadcaster and consultant and won The Good Housekeeping Award 2006 for outstanding contribution to food. Green has written 13 books including her best-selling book Henrietta Green’s Food Lover’s Guide to Britain. She has a monthly column in BBC Good Food magazine talking about regional and seasonal food.

Dawn Isaac


Dawn Isaac is a Chelsea Flower Show silver-medal-winning garden designer passionate about passing on all things horticultural to her three young children. This spurned her blog, littlegreenfingers.com, which has become a regular feature on the RHS family website.  Dawn writes regularly for The Guardian on garden design issues, for which she won The Garden Media Guild New Talent Award in 2010. She is also the gardening consultant for the award-winning Cbeebies series, Mr Bloom’s Nursery (more…)

Tom Kitchin

Tom Kitchin, 31, is the youngest ever proprietor-chef in Scotland to have been awarded a Michelin star.  The star was awarded at his Leith restaurant, The Kitchin, only seven months after he opened it with his wife, Michaela. Tom was born in Edinburgh and trained locally, after which he spent nearly a decade working with the legendary Pierre Koffmann in the 3 Michelin-starred La Tante Claire in London, and Koffmann remains his mentor to-date. Tom also spent two years at Alan Ducasse’s three-star Louis XV restaurant in Monte Carlo (more…)

Atul Kochhar


Atul Kochhar is the chef/patron of Benares in Mayfair, London. He was the first Indian chef to gain a Michelin star at Tamarind and has since also won a Michelin star at Benares. He has also opened Vatika in Hampshire and Ananda in Dublin to critical acclaim. Kochar has featured in numerous TV series, including BBC’s Masterchef Goes Large and Great British Menu. Kochar regularly appears on BBC2’s Saturday Kitchen, and will compete in BBC2’s series Put Your Menu Where Your Mouth Is. His first book, Indian Essence, was published in 2005, Fish-Indian Style came out in ’08 and Curries of the World  will be published in 2010.

Pierre Koffmann

Pierre Koffmann has been at the heart of fine cuisine in Britain for over 20 years. After working as a young chef in Strasbourg and Toulon, Pierre arrived in London in 1970 to work under Michel and Albert Roux at Le Gavroche. In 1972 he was made the first Head Chef of the Roux brothers new venture, The Waterside Inn at Bray. When Pierre opened La Tante Claire in London in 1977, it was the start of a residency at the top of the London culinary world that would span four decades. Within six years of opening, La Tante Claire had 3 Michelin stars (more…)

Jekka McVicar


Jekka McVicar is widely-considered to be the queen of herb gardening and cookery. She recently created Jamie Oliver’s herb garden and has won a record 59 RHS Gold medals for her herb displays to date at the Chelsea Flower Show. Jekka’s Herb Farm has been open for over 20 years now and she grows over 600 species of culinary, medicinal and aromatic herbs from around the world there. McVicar has published four books and she writes a regular column for BBC Gardener’s World magazine. She has appeared on many TV programmes including Jamie Oliver’s Oliver’s Twist, Rick Stein’s Food Heroes  (more…)

Andy Oliver

Andy Oliver was the runner-up in the last series of BBC’s Masterchef Goes Large and has gone on to work at some of London’s top restaurants including Brindisa, Bocca di Lupo and Maze. He has just taken up a job at Nahm, the first Michelin-starred Thai restaurant in Europe, to further his love of south-east Asian food.

Neil Phillips


Neil Phillips ‘makes wine makes sense’ in an entertaining, lively and informative way on TV, radio, online and at live shows. Neil has extensive experience as a speaker, interviewer, MC, voice-over artist and presenter of wine. His appearances include webchats, TV, numerous radio campaigns for wine brands such as Jacob’s Creek, Lindauer and Camp Viejo, Daily Mail online and he is the official wine expert for Taste of London and Taste of Christmas (more…)

Thane Prince

Thane Prince started her career as the food columnist for The Daily Telegraph and The Weekend Telegraph holding the position for twelve years until 1999. Since then she has written many food books, articles and presented several of her own TV food series.

Seeing the demand for hands on courses Thane opened her cookery school the highly successful ‘Aldeburgh Cookery School’ in Suffolk which was consistently voted in the top three cookery schools in the UK Thane has now returned to London and become involved in the vibrant food culture there. She has a website on which she gives her opinion on new restaurants, food news, and kitchen equipment as well as featuring new and classic recipes cooked and tested in her kitchen. www.thaneprince.com  (more…)

Glynn Purnell


Glynn Purnell owns and runs Purnell’s in Birmingham and was referred to as a Yummy Brummie by Olive Magazine. Winning dozens of awards for his inspired, adventurous cooking, he has remained firmly rooted in his home city with a passion to win the city’s first Michelin star, which he achieved in January 2005 as Head Chef at Jessica’s.
Glynn’s first food memory involved baked beans on toast and curry powder ! Left in charge of his little brother and sister, he would experiment on his siblings with new combinations and challenging their taste buds and  (more…)

Mike Robinson


Mike Robinson is the ‘wild food’ chef/presenter of ITV1’s highly succesful Countrywise and Countrywise Kitchen prime-time series’. 

Mike featured in 6 episodes of Countrywise in 2010, which led to the spin-off series ‘Countrywise Kitchen’. Both have proved very successful for ITV and he went on to feature in all 12 episodes of Countrywise in 2011 and present a second 8 part series of Countrywise Kitchen for summer 2011, 3 Xmas Specials in December 2011 attracting 4 million viewers each and an 8 part series in early 2012 (more…)

Rachel de Thample


Rachel de Thample has worked in the kitchens of Marco Pierre White, Heston Blumenthal and Peter Gordon. She has been writing on food issues for over a decade: she was Commissioning Editor of Waitrose Food Illustrated for five years and contributed to two Borough Market Cookbooks: Meat and Fish. Rachel is currently the Food Editor for the organic box scheme Abel & Cole, where she writes weekly seasonal recipes and meets with food buyers to look at the ethical aspects of sourcing food (more…)

Valentine Warner

Valentine Warner trained as a portrait painter before putting down the brush to pick up the spoon. He worked in London restaurants for eight years under such chefs as Alastair Little and Rose Cararina before setting up a private catering company, Green Pea. A passionate cook, he believes that a real understanding of ingredients, the producers involved and the natural history of ingredients contributes as much to the plate as the cooking itself (more…)

Tristan Welch

Tristan Welch was Head Chef at Launceston Place in London until Dec 2011 and is now taking a year’s sabbatical in Sweden with his family.

In 2000, he won the Award of Excellence from the Academy of Culinary Arts, which recognises exceptional talent and ambition in young chefs. Welch was awarded the (more…)