The Leinster Regional Final for the Restaurant Awards 2012 sponsored by Santa Rita / Sunday Independent Life Magazine took place in The Westin Hotel, Tuesday 16th April 2012.
Sunil Ghai won Best Chef in Co. Wicklow and Chakra won Best Customer Service in Co. Wicklow.
Speaking at the awards, Brian Fallon, President of The Restaurants Association said.
‘Since their inception, the Irish Restaurant Awards have cast a spotlight on Ireland’s hottest restaurants and chefs. They have become a byword for quality, class and achievement… The awards everyone wants to win. As a testament to their success, the entries have doubled since last year, with 5,000 nominations made for Ireland’s favourite Restaurants, Chefs, Gastro Pubs, Hotel Restaurants and Local Food Heroes throughout the Country.
We celebrate the award winning cuisines and the great restaurateurs and chefs who have brought international recognition and accolades to the Irish restaurant scene. We are the economic engine rooms in every town in Ireland, creating and maintaining much needed local employment. Our industry has annual sales in excess of €2 billion and we employ 64,000 people. In fact, we are the largest employer within the Irish Tourism Sector. And tonight, everyone is a winner’.
The Chakra team
Nominations for the awards were made by readers of the Sunday Independent Life Magazine and members of the Restaurants Association of Ireland. All nominees are then assessed by Regional Judging panels, made up of Industry experts across the region. Votes from the Consumer, Members of the Restaurants Association of Ireland and the Regional Judges are independently assessed by KPMG who give us our County Winner in each category.
Best Chef Sunil Ghai
- Official Mobile App for Dublin
You can now explore Dublin from the palm of
your hand! Dublin has never been closer…..
Explore, discover, experience and enjoy one of the most vibrant
capitals in Europe from the comfort of your home, at
35,000 feet, or the bustle of Grafton Street!
What’s it all About
The Visit Dublin App uses technology allowing you to use
directional search to move around Dublin and discover your
interests. Simply by pointing your Smartphone (iPhone/Android) you will find rich information about the places you see around you. This powerful pointing technology performs directionally filtered searches so that you get the information you are looking for quickly and easily. To find your way to an interesting spot, you can use the convenient Guide Me and/or Camera View augmented reality features.
And there is so much more…
The Visit Dublin App offers so much more to visitors and locals alike!
- Audio descriptions, explanations and history for over 80 points of interests around the city
- Special Offers in retail, restaurants and tours offering you fantastic value and options. Simply show the voucher on your phone and receive the offer!
- Use the ‘Point to Call’ function to phone a restaurant, tour and make your booking direct.
- ‘What’s That?’ – not sure what that building is in front of you?! Point at the real world point of interest and retrieve information about it!
- Daily Bulletin – receive a daily update to your phone on what is happening in Dublin
- Virtually explore Dublin before visiting. Users can virtually move to locations in Dublin and explore and research in advance of travelling!
- Information within the Visit Dublin App is cached allowing the majority of the data to be stored locally on your device thus enhancing search performance and playback
- The Visit Dublin App can function without any network connection, limiting roaming charges, for example, the application will work in airplane mode
Download for Android: Click Here
Download for iPhone: Click Here
Note: Roaming charges are incurred if users choose to pull down the Events category or Daily Bulletin categories or if they drill down to receive more detailed information about a point of interest.
Good Food Ireland Newcomer of the Year
WINNER: Ananda Restaurant (Dublin)
Award winning fine dining Indian Restaurant
Glimpsing the kitchen, the well-turned out chefs, a room that is intriguingly designed with rich tones, large windows and plenty of dark wood there is a complex statement being made here. Ananda sets it’s stall out early. And with good reason.
The chef is Sunil Ghai, who along with owner Asheesh Dewan, is responsible for the excellent Jaipur brand (a group of establishments spread throughout the city). Here however they have managed to distil a modern sense of India, fine dining and a deep and broad understanding of Indian cuisine into one cohesive and impressive whole.
While the format is well trodden – poppadoms and pickles, first and second courses – here you quickly realise things are different. The pickles for a start, deliver subtly and excitement in equal measure. Teasers? They certainly set you up with style.
Link…
Taste of Christmas 2011
Taste of Christmas hosts some of the capital’s best restaurants, celebrating all that’s great about eating out in Dublin. Expect menus of seasonally inspired, Irish and internationally accented cuisine in the 2011 line-up.
With a focus on flavour and the celebration of the best local and seasonal cuisine, the menus at Taste of Christmas offer an exciting snapshot of the capital’s best cooking.
Alongside the tapas-sized dishes carefully chosen to highlight the strengths of each restaurant, unique signature dishes will be created by chefs to specially reflect their philosophy and showcase seasonal and premium ingredients.
Link…
Picture shows:
Ananda Restaurant won The Gold Medal Award for Ethnic Restaurants @ the Hotel & Catering Review Gold Medal Awards 2011.
ANANDA, the cosmopolitan Indian restaurant in Dundrum Town Centre, has triumphed once again, winning the prestigious Hotel & Catering Review Gold Medal Award for Ethnic Restaurants, sponsored by Cobra, for the second successive year.
Located at Dublin’s shopping mecca, this multi-award winning eatery beat off stiff competition from peers in Ireland’s ethnic dining sector to scoop the coveted award at the 23rd Annual Hotel & Catering Review Gold Medal Awards on Monday night. Its achievement marks the third-straight win for Ananda’s parent, the Jaipur Group, which also topped the category in 2009 with its Greystones restaurant, Chakra.
Link…
PRESS RELEASE
MasterChef Ireland 2011
In this programme, the seven remaining MasterChef Ireland contestants take on the complexities of Indian cooking when they have to prepare food for paying guests in Ananda, an award-winning Indian restaurant in Dundrum, Dublin, where they will have to master the art of preparing Indian dishes to a fine dining standard.
Ananda at Dundrum is often described as one of the best Indian dining experiences in Ireland and is a partnership between serial restaurateur Asheesh Dewan and the inimitable Atul Kochhar, the first Indian chef to receive a Michelin star for his renowned London restaurant Benares.
Ananda’s Executive Chef, Sunil Ghai has won many awards and fans for his bold contemporary cooking style, including the Chef of the Year in 2009 at the Food and Wine Awards.
Sunil gives the contestants a Masterclass in Indian cookery in which he talks about three main things – spices, a basic curry base and rice. The seven contestants are then divided into two groups. Clare Anne, Christine and Mary will cook a lunch service and Shane, Mike, Bridin and Pierce will cook a dinner service.
The second task of the programme is an Indian-themed invention test, in which all seven have 15 minutes in Eurasia, Ireland’s largest ethnic ingredients store, to choose ingredients for an Indian dish which will then have to be cooked back in the MasterChef kitchen for Nick and Dylan.
Things are hotting up in more ways than one for the remaining seven as there’s a twist in the tail at eliminations. All seven know they will have to produce impeccable food to have any chance of staying in the competition and winning the coveted title of MasterChef Ireland.
Find out more…
See the video…
Picture shows:
Sunil Ghai, executive chef at Ananda Restaurant in Dublin, offers Minister for Tourism Leo Varadkar a taste of India as a delegation, led by Tourism Ireland, prepared to depart for Bangalore to participate in Destination Britain & Ireland(DEBI), the biggest B2B travel trade event in the region. They are pictured with Niall Gibbons, CEO, Tourism Ireland(right).
Tourism Ireland was able to capitalise on the new visa waiver scheme during its tourism trade mission to Bangalore this month, where it took part in Destination Britain & Ireland, the biggest business to business travel trade event in the Asia-Pacific region. There Irish tourism representatives met with 120 top-producing tour operators, travel agents and travel media from 15 emerging markets including Indiam Chinam Australia, New Zealand, Japan, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.
‘With the Governments’s recently announced imaginative tourist visa waiver scheme making it easier for tourists from emerging economies to visit Ireland, the time is right to step up promotion in markets in the Asia-Pacific region,’ said Tourism Ireland CEO, Niall Gibbons. ‘The Asia-Pacific region offers exciting possibilities for tourism to the island of Ireland in the medium to long-term. The United Nations World Tourism Organisation(UNWTO) has forecast that the Asia-Pacific region will be one of the fastest-growing regions for outbound travel in the next 10 years.’
Thu 26 May 2011 – Irish Restaurant Awards 2011
Best Customer Service 2011
Leinster
Chakra by Jaipur
A Taste of India with Sunil Ghai of Ananda
1 Day Course
Date: Thursday 15th September 2011
Time: 9:30am to 5:00pm
Price: €245
Demonstrations: 2
No Practical Sessions
We are delighted to be able to welcome Sunil Ghai from Ananda Restaurants to teach a one day course at the cookery school.
Chef Sunil Ghai,
Food & Wines’s ‘Chef of the Year 2009’, is the foremost Indian chef in Ireland, winning an impressive array of awards, and fans, for his bold, contemporary cooking style. Executive Chef of the Jaipur Restaurant Group, Chef Ghai is currently at the helm of ‘Ananda’ and regularly spends time working with the team at Benares in London under renowned Michelin starred chef Atul Kochhar. Atul and Sunil together designed Ananda’s menu which has set new standards for Indian cuisine in Ireland.
Born in India in 1977, Sunil Ghai was born into a middle class family in Gwalior in Central India. A city, that is home to the greatest classical schools of music through royal patronage for over 400 years and thus, brought out the best in cuisines from every corner of the nation. His first passion in life was cricket followed by his Father’s first love, cooking.
“Many of my influences in the creation of my recipes come from my mother. she has a fantastic imagination when it came to cooking and I have yet to taste food quite like it”. In the kitchen, I found the answers to all my curiosities,” says Indian-born chef Sunil Ghai.
Work with the best
Dublin’s only Three Month Certificate Course starts this September. Lynda Booth has the backing and involvement of some of the top chefs in the country including Neven Maguire, Paul Flynn, Oliver Dunne and Sunil Ghai as well as international chefs Atul Kochhar, David Thompson and Matthew Albert. The format has been carefully thought out to provide variety and challenge and the opportunity for an intense focus on broadening food knowledge and skills.
Highlights of the new Three Month Certificate Course include:
- Stellar calibre of visiting international and Irish chefs – including the likes of Paul Flynn, Neven Maguire, Oliver Dunne and Sunil Ghai, as well as head chefs from some of London’s more celebrated ethnic restaurants.
- Field-trip visits to the home-base of some of the country’s leading food professionals, including visits to artisan producers.
- The unique challenge of running regular restaurant nights to acclimatise students to the comprehensive experience of hosting, organising, cooking and serving a professional meal.
- Career and business development advice from leading industry experts, as well as support in seeking out work experience placements for those keen to follow a professional path – whether that be in order to work their way around the world on gap year travels, or to carve out a new professional life.
- A skillset of culinary building blocks spanning from core kitchen principles to sophisticated professional techniques – making the course as accessible to inexperienced novices as it is eye-opening to competent cooks.
- and so on…
Sunil Ghai – Jaipur Group & Ananda, Dundrum
Sunil has garnered an impressive array of fans and awards for his bold, contemporary cooking style. Not only the foremost Indian chef in Ireland, Sunil was officially recognised as one of the very best chefs working in Ireland when he won the FOOD&WINE Magazine Chef of the Year Award 2009.
Born in Gwalior in central India, Sunil gained experience with the world famous Oberoi group before coming to Ireland to join the Jaipur group in 2001. He is now head chef of Ananda, Dundrum, and also regularly spends time working with the team at Benares in London under Michelin-starred chef Atul Kochhar. Sunil has been a regular guest chef at Dublin Cookery School; we value his contribution not just for the vast knowledge and experience he brings to the school, but also because he is a skilled, patient and experienced teacher.
