International Chef School
Just a couple of kilometres off the Johannesburg to Pretoria highway is a chef school of international repute – this is the Prue Leith Chefs’ Academy, renamed from the Prue Leith College of Wine and Food. The academy is situated in the grounds of the old Lyttleton Manor House surrounded by the garden suburb of Hennopspark. In the academy grounds you will find not only the usual elements of a chef’s school, but also a restaurant of international repute. The restaurant, Prue Leith’s, has been awarded its Blazon by the Chaîne des Rôtisseurs, a truly international recognition of its excellence. Prue Leith’s has also been voted among the top one hundred restaurants in South Africa.
But the truly great thing about Prue Leith’s is that the whole restaurant is manned and run by students from the international chef’s school. From early on in their first semester students are required to work in the restaurant – they can be found in the cold and hot kitchens preparing and cooking menu dishes, taking orders from diners, serving meals at table, greeting and seating guests, working behind the bar and as wine steward and as Maître d’Hotel. All this is done under the supervision of a professional restaurant manager. Prue herself is a caterer of international repute and was awarded the OBE for her services to the catering industry in the United Kingdom.
Courses at this international chef school commence twice a year in January and July and last for eighteen months. A maximum of thirty students are accommodated on each course, so a maximum of ninety students may be found at the school at any one time. Numbers found at the school at any one time are rarely that high though – some may be rostered for an evening shift in the restaurant and a number may be doing their practical training at any one of a number of internationally acclaimed catering establishments dotted about South Africa and overseas. Students spend periods of eight weeks during their second and third semesters at one of these five star hotels, restaurants and game lodges that may be as far afield as Ireland or the United Arab Emirates, gaining valuable experience in the real workplace.
Specialist guest lecturers introduce further international flavour into the chef’s school with such subjects as Thai, Chinese or Japanese cuisine, French cuisine, pan-African cooking and bush cooking – the latter taking place in the open air college boma. Many international chefs have graduated from the school over the past ten years and have ended up in the kitchens of famous chef’s of repute around the world. Graduates of the Prue Leith Chefs’ Academy are frequently offered jobs at the international catering establishments where they have done their practical training. The Diploma course at this international chef’s school is extremely comprehensive, continually being amended if necessary, and second to none. It is with pride that we often see classified advertisements for staff that state, “Prue Leith graduates only”.
