Corinthia Palace Hotel & Spa chefs earn top spots in major UK competition

● The luxury hotel’s awardwinning chefs once again received international recognition for their superb culinary skills

Chefs from the Corinthia Palace Hotel & Spa’s award-winning kitchen brigade have scored top positions in several categories at the Birmingham Salon Culinaire 2019 in the UK.

As the UK’s largest and most prestigious chef competition of 2019, the Salon Culinaire is world-renowned for showcasing the finest talent in the industry. At this year’s event, which took place on 22 and 23 January, the eight participating Corinthia Palace chefs overtook entries from a number of countries to receive the sought-after awards.

“We are very proud of our chefs, who more than rose to the challenge of competing at a very high level against international chefs of an equally exceptional standard,” says the Corinthia Palace Hotel & Spa’s executive head chef Stefan Hogan. “Having proved themselves yet again as being some of the world’s finest chefs, they are ready to continue to excel within the Corinthia Palace restaurants, creating mouth-watering, award-winning cuisine for our guests in Malta.”

At the Salon Culinaire, Reuben Borg was first runnerup in both the Silver Lamb and Silver Tilda young chef categories, while he also won the silver for filleting of seabass and trout, and bronze in creating an avocado-based starter. Johan Saliba was awarded the best in class for the silver lamb dish and was the bronze second runner-up in the Tilda Young Chef category.

Mark Tabone was presented with the bronze in best end of lamb butchery and he also received a merit in the vegan chal- lenge. Ryan Buhagiar earned a merit in the open chicken (essential cuisine) awards category, while Alvin Vassallo won the merit for perfect pasta.

Ian Deguara won merits in both the amuse bouche and open pasta categories and Owen Bonello received the silver in butchery for sauté of chicken and the bronze in open pasta.

Daniel Busuttil was awarded the best in class silver in perfect pasta, the silver for his oriental dish and the silver in butchery for sauté of chicken.

Busuttil also recently won one of only three Mentor Nomination Awards at the IIHM International Young Chef Olympiad 2019 in Kolkata. Based on specific criteria including drive, ambition, the ability to overcome obstacles and dedication to the trade, the three awardwinners were selected from 50 international applicants based on a written submission from a Mentor – in Busuttil’s case, Corinthia Palace executive sous chef Jonathan Zammit – and following a detailed interview process by a panel of judges. Alongside Busuttil, the other two Mentor Nomination Awards went to candidates from Canada and Scotland.

While in India, chef Hogan was asked to form part of a panel of internationally-recognised chefs, which included professionals from Canada, the UK, Hong Kong, India and Italy. Throughout the competition, the chefs were divided into technical and tasting judges (blind tasting) and chef Hogan joined the tasting panel in the Knockout Stage in Delhi. He was also one of the tasting judges for the Final Challenge in Kolkata.