Young Chef Finalists revealed #Blog

Lisa Edwards
9th February 2017

Judging took place last night at West Cheshire College to find the 4 young chef finalists who will take part in the final at Chester Food & Drink Festival 2017 on Easter Sunday 16 April judged by Gregg Wallace.

Myself and Briony from Taste Cheshire and Chef Brian Mellor, of Harthill Cookery School were the 3 judges.  And what a difficult task we had.  8 Semi Finalists battled it out from both South Cheshire and West Cheshire Colleges.

Each candidate had 45 minutes to prepare and present their dish for judging.  We had tough categories to judge the chefs on, ranging from, skills used during cooking, complexity of the dish, attention to detail when cooking, uniformity of the dishes, restaurant useability and saleability of the dishes and overall taste and balance. No mean task for a judge!

We were presented with the most amazingly prepared food from such talented young chefs. Dishes ranged from fish, chips and minted peas, smoked salmon with a pancetta risotto, pork tenderloin with italian ham and courgette boat to chocolate and lime cheesecake to name but a few.

After much deliberation and tasting of each element of each dish, we judges, sat down and reviewed each of the candidates against our criteria.  We finally agreed on the 4 young chefs to take through to the final who were:-

James Higgins, Richard Postles, Matthew Evans and Melissa Brown.

Well done to all semi finalists and congratulations and good luck to the 4 finalists.