Raymond Blanc hails work in hospitality during careers fair at Dumfries House
Celebrated chef Raymond Blanc encouraged teenagers to consider working in the hospitality industry during a careers fair organised by The King's Foundation.
Blanc, 75, who became an ambassador for the foundation in March, spoke to 250 pupils from 16 schools at the event at Dumfries House, East Ayrshire, on Tuesday.
The French chef, who has two Michelin stars at his Oxfordshire hotel and restaurant Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons, shared stories about working his way up the ranks in kitchens, after starting as a pot-washer, and gave them an insight into the variety of jobs in the industry.
Blanc has mentored notable chefs including Heston Blumenthal and Marco Pierre White, and also worked with aspiring chefs on BBC programme The Restaurant between 2007 and 2009 when couples competed to open a restaurant with his support.
Dumfries House hosts an introduction to hospitality course run by the foundation, which aims to provide students with the skills, experience and confidence to work in both front and back-of-house roles. The course is accredited by City and Guilds and includes a week-long industry placement.
Blanc, a father-of-two, said he is using his new role to 'encourage excellence' in the next generation working in hospitality.
He said: 'At their age, I had no idea what I wanted to do. I started off as a cleaner before becoming the best dishwasher and glass cleaner.
'It's so important that young people are encouraged and supported to work in the hospitality industry as there's an enormous opportunity there for those willing to work hard.
'Education is something that's very important to me so I was proud to be a part of The King's Foundation's hospitality careers fair.
'Young people need good mentors to reach their full potential.
'As an ambassador for The King's Foundation, I want to take what we've learnt at Le Manoir aux Quat'Saisons and pair it with the excellent work of The King's Foundation to encourage excellence amongst the next generation of culinary and horticulture professionals.'
Livia Alexander, hospitality education manager at the foundation, said: 'The hospitality industry continues to face challenges in terms of recruitment and retention, and events like this are so important as they show young people what the industry is really like, and give them an insight into the careers available.
'Having Raymond Blanc OBE come and talk to the pupils was an amazing opportunity for them.
'His story is so incredible, and the pupils left feeling inspired and motivated.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Guardian
8 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Charli xcx at Glastonbury review – a thrilling hostile takeover by a pop star at the peak of her powers
For my money, one of the best pop tours of the 21st century was Kanye West's Yeezus tour. Like the album it was supporting, the Yeezus tour was abrasive and minimal and totally spectacular: West stood in front of gigantic bright-red screens and blasted arenas with some of the harshest, most acidic sounds ever considered mainstream. That tour was unrelenting and uncompromising and, as a result, totally compelling. Charli xcx's Brat tour may be the only clear successor. It is a show whose main components are a curtain, a few stadium strobe light rigs, and one star whose vision is so specific and so well realised that the 'necessities' of an A-list pop show – dancers, set pieces, etc – suddenly seem like crutches for anyone less in tune with themselves. This makes sense, given that Charli is also our clearest successor to West himself: despite being a prodigiously talented mainstream songwriter, she has dedicated her career to exploring the most caustic, hallucinatory sounds of the underground, and working out how best to synthesise them with the pleasures of pure pop music. With the release of last year's Brat, an album that became a cultural moment without ever diluting Charli's ingenuity, mainstream culture finally caught up to Charli. So it's fitting that she's here at Worthy Farm headlining, by some metrics, the biggest music festival in the world. Of course, she's not really headlining – Charli's Saturday night set closing the Other stage is, on a purely technical level, second billed to Neil Young, who is headlining the Pyramid at the same time. But ask anyone here, and the headliner of the entire weekend is Charli. Her audience at the Other stage is dizzyingly huge, surely at least 60,000 people – a surreal sight for the many gay men who saw her perform in 200-capacity clubs as recently as 2019. And from the very first moments of her set, when she intones, gravely, 'Glastonbury, don't fucking play with me', it's clear that she is at the height of her powers, totally capable of holding the attention of a stadium's worth of people. After all – who else could warrant a general expanding of the Other stage and the addition of more screens and speakers? Even if Charli wasn't first billed, everyone at Glastonbury knew she was headlining. This was made clear with an intense, totally uncompromising set in which Charli performed totally alone, not even with collaborators such as Lorde, who was also at Glastonbury. The Brat tour is at its most effective when the viewer has to submit to Charli's world, and this show, loud and bawdy and sometimes very unnerving in its intensity, was practically Charli-led hostile takeover. Her skill is in welding sophistication on to brute force – consider a song like Club Classics, which deftly stitches together at least four different styles of dance music in barely four minutes, but also brandishes a chorus of simply 'me, me, me, me' – and even when she breaks script, you see that skill in action. 'I'm known to have a heart of stone,' she tells the crowd, 'But this is very fucking emotional.' She should save her tears – with an audition so memorable, so fun, so spectacular, the Pyramid has to be next.
Daily Mail
12 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Seven-time Wimbledon champion Novak Djokovic implores locals to allow the building of 39 new courts which he says will make the All England Club 'truly outstanding'
Novak Djokovic will surely be facing some tricky opponents over the coming days – but he may find there are none tougher than the SW19 locals. The seven-time champion yesterday encouraged those living close to the All England Club to allow plans for Wimbledon to build 39 new courts on the famous site. Djokovic, 38, was reacting to objections by residents which have held up the expansion project – which would include a third showcourt – for years. The plans were rejected on the grounds the mixture of public and private courts, plus a 23-acre public park, would affect the 'openness' of a golf course owned by the club which has been closed to the public for a century. Djokovic said Wimbledon is a 'special place', but delivering on their expansion will make it 'truly outstanding'. He told The Mail on Sunday: 'Having the new courts and all the beautiful new parkland, on what was a golf course, is a real win for everyone in my opinion. I hope they can deliver it soon.' While Angela Rayner and Wimbledon might not seem the most natural bedfellows, the Housing Secretary's move to relax planning rules is the club's best hope of breaking the impasse. She has vowed to speed up the planning process to boost developments across the UK. Backing Djokovic's call, four-time Wimbledon semi-finalist Tim Henman said: 'All other Grand Slams hold their qualifying events on their main site, which creates a sense of anticipation for players – an important part of the lead up to the main tournament that we'd like to also harness at Wimbledon. 'Qualifying is currently held on a leased site at Roehampton, which means we cannot invest in the long-term improvements that we need to provide a world- leading environment for those playing in qualifying.' He added: 'This project will allow us to keep pace with the other Grand Slams and provide the best possible experience for players and spectators from around the world.' A backer of the proposals said they would ' deliver one of the greatest sporting transformations for London since 2012', adding: 'They are crucial to ensuring Wimbledon remains at the pinnacle of tennis... and a global attraction for both London and the UK.'
BBC News
25 minutes ago
- BBC News
Charli, Neil Young and Scissor Sisters give Glastonbury goosebumps
Saturday was a night of four headliners at Glastonbury, with fans facing the cruel choice between pop queen Charli XCX, rock legend Neil Young, disco scamps Scissor Sisters and Doechii - rap's hottest new voice. Charli XCX won the biggest audience, closing down The Other Stage and turning it into a sweat-drenched, laser lit club topping the bill on the Pyramid Stage, also delivered an all-time hits set, with gnarly, ragged versions of hits like Cinnamon Girl and Like A who only played for 45 minutes, still managed to mark herself out as a future headliner; while Scissor Sisters brought out actual Gandalf Sir Ian McKellen to perform Invisible Light. There was a lot to take in, then, thanks to one of the most crammed line-ups in the festival's start with Charli XCX. Using up the festival's entire smoke machine budget, she was alone on stage all night, but in constant motion - a mesmerising blur of hip-rolls, hair tosses, stomach crunches and opened her set with a mash-up of 360 and Von Dutch, two of the the standout track from last summer's culture-swallowing Brat album, as the record's logo burst into flames behind her - indicating that she's slowly coming to terms with leaving it rumours that she'd bring out a host of special guests, Lorde doesn't appear to duet on Girl, So Confusing, and Billie Eilish is missing from the number one smash, Guess. The only famous face we got was Gracie Abrams, who appeared on the big screens to perform the "Apple dance" that went viral on TikTok last year. Fans were momentarily disappointed, but nothing could detract from the insolent, messy glory of tracks like Club Classics or Sympathy Is A Knife. At the end of her set, she reclaimed I Love It - the bubblegum pop anthem she donated to Icona Pop in 2012, before reassuring fans that she wasn't really ready to let go of her breakthrough album, after all."I think you have all proven to me that Brat is forever," flashed a message on the video screens as the music disintegrated into glitched siren sounds and pyrotechnics exploded. "And honestly, I don't know who I am if it's over."So that's settled: Charli can come back and headline again after Glastonbury's fallow year in 2026. Neil Young's set was a very different, but equally gnarly, proposition. The rocker walked on stage alone, hunched over with his face obscured by a corduroy cap, to play a hushed acoustic version of the classic Sugar that was a cunning misdirect. His new band, The Chrome Hearts, joined him immediately afterwards, launching into a furious flurry of guitar anthems - Be The Rain, Cinnamon Girl and Hey Hey, My My - full of jagged chords and intense crowd swooned when they switched back to acoustic mode for The Needle and The Damage Done and Harvest Moon; and cheered when Young announced he was playing Hank Williams' old guitar (a battered and worn acoustic) on the Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young song Looking star might be 79 years old, but his voice is still unusually supple and youthful; buoyed up by The Chrome Hearts' close-knit they were at their best on the heavier material - in particular Like A Hurricane, whose time-bending guitar solo felt like a revelation. Young always seems to get great pleasure from playing that particular song, and it was mesmerising to ended the set with Tear Your Hatred Down, a savage takedown of politicians and the war machine, that contrasts the idealism of the 1960s with the cruelties of the modern world. Both as a protest song and a lament for human nature, it was a powerful way to end a peerless set. Doechii drew a huge crowd to the West Holts Stage - including pop star Harry Styles, who danced away to her brief set in the middle of the field, unbothered by Florida-born rapper, known to fans as the Swamp Princess, sang, rapped, danced and changed outfits multiple times, in a show that was themed as a lesson in the history of flow was flawless on breakout tracks like Persuasive, Anxiety, Denial Is A River and Alter Ego - and she even made fun of herself, recreating a popular social media clip from this year's Met Gala, where she was overhead demanding "more umbrellas" to cover her body as she changed was aided by her eight dancers, who climbed over props, twerked and even vogued while descending a rise over the past year has been nothing short of phenomenal and, while fans await her debut album, this slick, bespoke Glastonbury performance felt like a new feather in her Sisters, meanwhile, continued their reunion by packing out the Woodsies tent for a set that reminded everyone how many classics they'd written - from I Don't Feel Like Dancing and Laura to the ever so sleazy Filthy/ Ware joined them on stage for a celebratory strut through I Don't Feel Like Dancin', while Ian McKellen recreated his monologue from the 2010 single Invisible he stood in the wings, fans started chanting "Oh, Ian McKellen" to the tune of The White Stripes Seven Nation Army, at which the actor clasped his hands to his face in shock. What happened earlier? Although the clash between acts was tough, none of them suffered the ignominy of a small crowd. Charli definitively had the biggest audience and while Young's set started with a thinner-than-usual crowd at the Pyramid Stage, people drifted in during the first 15 minutes - and most of those who did stuck with him. Earlier in the day, Kaiser Chiefs opened up the main stage, striding out to the strains of the Was (Not Was) classic, Walk The it a self-deprecating reference to their advancing age? Who knows. But after 20 years, songs like Every Day I Love You Less And Less and I Predict A Riot sounded as fresh as country singer Brandi Carlile was also a revelation to much of the audience. A huge star at home, she'd never had a Top 40 album in this country until she released the Elton John collaboration Who Believes In Angels this her early afternoon slot, she won the crowd over with a gorgeous cover of Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees, and prompted a few tears with the acoustic ballad You Without Me, which depicts her daughter's rocky teenage the end of the set, she was on the receiving end of a supportive chant of "olé, olé, olé"."It's official," Carlile beamed. "I have now played the greatest festival on earth… And it only took me to 44 years old to do it." Jade drew a huge crowd to the Woodsies stage, displaying her 17 years of pop experience with a slick, high concept set full of pop bangers; including a thrilling medley of songs from her old band, Little Raye got one of the day's biggest audiences at the Pyramid Stage. Backed by a miniature orchestra, she put a jazzy spin on hits like You Don't Know Me, Oscar Winning Tears and her award-winning psychodrama singer played the same stage just two years ago, near the bottom of the bill, before her career enjoyed a remarkable turnaround that culminated in a record haul of six Brit Awards."When I came out here I was so nervous," said the singer, who'd earlier admitted her voice was "a bit croaky"."Now I feel so up home at here and I don't want to leave." Raye inherited her audience from a "secret" set by Pulp, who'd been billed as Patchwork, fooling band were there to celebrate the 30th anniversary of their career-making headline performance in 1995, when they were booked at the last minute to replace The Stone Roses."We only had 10 days notice," said frontman Jarvis Cocker, "so consequently we were the most nervous we've ever been."But today I feel very relaxed."Patchwork were Pulp, after allHaim were the special guests on The Park stage, drawing a humungous crowd for their rhythmic take on classic rock. Highlights included set opener The Wire (a song they wrote in 2008!), the sleazy groove of Gasoline and the party-jam R&B of Relationships. The day had a share of controversy, courtesy of rap trio Kneecap and punk-rap band Bob Vylan, after their performances on the West Holts say they are assessing videos of comments made by both acts, who criticised the UK government and Israel's actions in Gaza during consecutive, politically-charged hit back at Kier Starmer in politically-charged setGovernment condemns Glastonbury chants aired live on BBC There was drama on The Other Stage - the festival's second-biggest arena - after Deftones had to pull out due to illness.A quick ring around the site fixed the gap in the schedule, with UK rap supremo Skepta putting on an impromptu performance. "No crew, no production but I am ready to shut Glastonbury down," he posted on social media, ahead of the show. "Victory lap time." He was preceded by Mercury Prize winners Ezra Collective, whose life-affirming jazz and Afrobeat grooves got a helping hand from special guests including Loyle Carner and Sasha by drummer Femi Koleoso, they brought a carnival atmosphere to the field, with the audience making space for each other to sway, shake and generally flail their limbs as the sun set over Worthy Farm."You practice your whole life for just one second that might feel like that," beamed Koleoso as he came off stage. "Sometimes we're in these really negative bubbles where it's like, we all hate each other, we're all divided. But sometimes you just need to go to Glastonbury and see that that's a myth."Love for one another and respect for each other and our neighbours, it does exist, and it's a special thing to be the soundtrack to that."The festival continues on Sunday with performances from Rod Stewart, Chic, Wolf Alice, Joy Crookes and Pyramid Stage headliner Olivia Rodrigo.
