Michelin chef and curried turkey, in the new Sangatte
A NEW Sangatte- style camp opened in Calais yesterday, offering three- course meals cooked by a Michelin restaurant chef to thousands of migrants.
The 12-acre centre will provide beds, showers, toilets, a laundry service and medical facilities for the 2,500 migrants sleeping rough in the French port town.
There will also be 168 power points for them to charge their mobile phones so they can ‘call their relatives back home and those already in Britain’.
The three-course meals will be seasoned with imported spices to make the migrants ‘feel at home’. Incredibly, the meals will cost £2.30 each – three times more than the British Government spends on primary school meals.
The camp will also offer legal advice from immigration experts for migrants wishing to apply for asylum in the UK.
The permanent Jules Ferry camp – a tenminute walk from where migrants jump on lorries bound for the UK – will cost about £6million a year to run. Half the bill will be paid using a £3million ‘special’ grant from the EU which would include money from British taxpayers. The other half is being paid by the French government.
Camp director Stephane Duval said: ‘It will be a more complete service than Sangatte, which only offered accommodation. Here we will also offer food, medical care, laundry and washing facilities and social care.’
Last night hundreds of smiling migrants queued for the camp’s first meal.
Portions of chick peas in lamb broth were served from vats inside a large army-style tent in the grounds of the former children’s summer camp.
A 23-year- old Afghan called Raja said: ‘ The facilities are much better here than anything we’d had before. The food is also much better too.
‘I’m really pleased that they have lots of power sockets as I like to speak to my friends in England on the phone and over Facebook.’
He added: ‘I worked as a chef in Scotland for six years after getting to Britain on a lorry from Dunkirk. Now I am trying to get on another lorry in Calais.’
Eritrean Sami, 21, who has been trying to get on a truck for f our months, said the camp would help him stay for as long as it took to reach Britain.
He said: ‘I think the new centre is a big improvement. The food here is really good. It’s better than before.’ A camp source added: ‘We were expecting more people but there are a large queue of lorries on the road to the port which many are trying to get on. ‘This is their real priority.’ The centre can cook for 500 migrants a day. By mid-March, up to 1,500 will be given one three- course meal at two sittings between 5pm and 7pm. They will be given soup as a starter, a different main course each day – including lamb meatballs and beef with peppers – and fruit or yoghurt for desert.
One of the four chefs is Christophe Duchene, who worked for two years a trainee chef at the Michelin- starred restaurant Auberge Du Dun near Dieppe. Mr Duchene, 43, said: ‘I am a chef and my job is to cook food which people like so I will be doing my best for these people.
‘They are African and Asian people and they like hot, spicy food so we have laid on ample stocks of spices like curry, chili pepper sauce, turmeric and pepper.
‘I will be eager to talk to the people who serve the f ood because they will be telling me whether the people like what we cook or not and we will be adapting our dishes to their tastes.’
By mid-March, accommodation for up to 100 women and their children will be available. Men will not be allowed to stay at the camp.
Some believe that queues to
‘Adapting dishes to
their tastes’
use the facilities at the camp will soar in the summer months as hundreds more migrants reach Calais.
Mr Duval said: ‘We will provide goodquality food once a day and tomorrow there will be a tent where there will be two mobile banks containing a total of 168 sockets to enable the migrants to charge their phones. The migrants will not be allowed to leave the tent while their phones are charging. in this way we will avoid any problems of theft.
‘The shower block will open in midMarch which is when the first women and children will be accommodated. There will also be facilities for the migrants to change clothes in changing rooms and wash their clothes.’
it is the first state-sponsored large-scale shelter for Calais migrants since the controversial Sangatte Red Cross hostel was bulldozed in 2002.
Sangatte was used by an estimated 60,000 migrants as a springboard for illegal entry into the Uk during its six years of operation. Since it closed, migrants built various unofficial makeshift camps in the town including the infamous camp called The Jungle where a British journalism student was raped in 2008.
But last summer French officials decided a new centre should be built as the number of people living rough in the town swelled. Prime Minister David Cameron responded by saying Britain does not want a return to the ‘bad days of Sangatte’.
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