HOME-GROWN CHEFS BRING THREE ROSETTES TO ALDERLEY EDGE

The Alderley Edge Hotel’s prestige restaurant has joined the country’s top 10 per cent to be awarded a coveted three AA rosettes.

And ‘The Alderley Restaurant’ in Cheshire is the only new three-rosette eatery between Birmingham and Edinburgh in the latest round of newly announced top food accolades.

It places head chef Chris Holland’s team alongside famous London restaurants like Marco Pierre White’s ‘L’Escargot’, Michele Roux’s ‘Le Gavroche’, and ‘Gordon Ramsay at Claridges’.

The AA’s hotel services group area manager, Giovanna Grossi, praised Chris’s “innovative touches along with his creative use of flavours - resulting in top notch cuisine.”

The restaurant was also commended for its ‘imaginative menus‘ and use of local produce.

The move from two to three rosettes is, said Chris, “a tremendous reward for a lot of hard work. I’m lucky to have a committed team of people who have all contributed to creating food that just doesn’t exist elsewhere.

“Our main aim has always been to provide our customers with the most exciting food we can achieve but to be acknowledged by the hard-to-please AA judges really is the icing on a very nice cake.”

For the Alderley Edge Hotel’s general manager, Ahmet Kurcer, the rosettes are recognition for his policy of encouraging ‘home-grown’ staff. Chris Holland is a Greater Manchester-born chef and his team are drawn from the surrounding area.

“It’s not unusual for restaurants to grow their own ingredients – and we grow our own herbs in the gardens behind the hotel – but we also ‘grow’ our own staff,” he says. “We give them opportunities, nurture their professional growth and now we can harvest the fruits of their talent.

“Chris has been with us for 12 years and was appointed head chef four years ago. In that time he has become an outstanding chef who has raised the bar for fine food menus. His signature dishes take traditional British classics and give them an often extravagant twist that uses textures and releases flavours to improve the original.”

AA rosettes are awarded twice a year in recognition of “exceptional standards of cuisine”. Three rosettes, says the AA, “takes a restaurant into the big league. Expectations of the kitchen are high, exact technique, flair and imagination must come through in every dish, and balance and depth of flavour are all-important.”

Giovanna Grossi added: “Restaurants serving food of a three-rosette standard are worthy of recognition from well beyond their local area.”

• The Alderley Restaurant’ is on Macclesfield Road, Alderley Edge, Cheshire SK9 7BJ; tel - 01625 583033; website: www.alderleyedgehotel.com

CALLS FOR EURO ACTION ON COMPUTER ENERGY COSTS

A Bury-based IT specialist is calling for the European Parliament to crack down on businesses who flaunt energy saving principles by wasting nearly £6 billion a year.

Greater Manchester’s award-winning IT conservationist ACR IT Solutions is lobbying North West members of the European Parliament because, says managing director Steve Freeman, “this country is on its knees when it comes to power and some form of legislation or financial incentive is probably the only way forward.”

Nearly five million small-to-medium businesses – which account for over 99% of the UK total – are estimated to spend £7.2 billion on energy, this year, to run their computers, servers and data storage facilities and data centre’s.

But that could be shaved to a more realistic £1.3 billion … saving a massive £5.9 billion.

‘Virtualisation’ - a software technology that is rapidly transforming the IT industry and the way it works – is established in the server, network and storage market. Now it is even reaching desktop users because of the dramatic reduction in power consumption.

For businesses it not only cuts computer-related energy expenses but also carbon emissions, floor space, heating, lighting, air conditioning and maintenance costs while delivering other IT benefits such as more efficient storage, disaster recovery, business continuity, reduced hardware refresh costs and operational expenditure. And the saving normally covers the service cost within 18 months.

“Energy conservation on this massive business scale should be encouraged by either government incentives or the consideration of heavy fines for businesses that ignore their responsibilities,” says Steve, whose business is a premier UK provider of virtualisation.

“If people can be fined for dropping a cigarette packet in the street how much should they have to pay for needlessly wasting a massive £6 billion worth of energy when it’s so simple to reduce that to a more reasonable amount?

“Even outside the moral issue of energy conservation, virtualisation technology offers businesses a way of cutting costs while improving operational efficiency and keeping competitive during the economic uncertainties of this recession.

“But refusing to save that amount of power condemns the environment, instead, to pick up the tab.”

• Energy usage by the UK’s 4,853,640 small/medium businesses was calculated at a modest three 2cpu servers per business with each one using 550 watts at £0.01 per kilowatt. Total annual energy cost - £7,385,444,233 compared with £1,327,926,782 when virtualised – saving £5,940,466,584.