Hey Brookes!

This month has been super busy for me. I’ve had to complete and submit my dissertation and manage an event all in the same week! This blog I’ll be telling you all about my event and how it went.

As part of my Hospitality course for one of our modules we have to manage an event that will be held in the Brookes Restaurant between Feb and March. At the beginning of the first semester we are put into teams of 4-5 and given a theme. The theme could be as broad as Orange, Lemons and Limes, or something specific such as Vegetarian. Our team was given the theme ‘Celebrating British Fish’. We then had to come up with a menu and how we would like the restaurant to look, all the while ensuring that whatever we spent on as costs for the event we had to make 40% profit.  As part of the course we were required to serve a 3 course set menu with canapés and petit fours. It also had to include a welcome drink. The ticket price that we had to sell at was £27.50. We decided that our event would celebrate Britain’s underused fish and highlight the sustainability issues within the fishing industry, particularly in and around Britain. We decided to title the even ‘Britain’s Forgotten Fish – A Supper to Save the Sea’.

Before the Christmas holiday a team member left our group member who had taken over the role of restaurant manager. This was particularly difficult for our group as we then had to cover their specific roles and responsibilities along with covering ours. However, we managed to finish our plan by January. Our goal was to sell 60 tickets but with 1 month to go we had no bookings yet. We immediately went out and printed lots of flyers and posters that we could put up around Brookes University. We also had a ‘special’ on at Brookes Restaurant where one of the dishes on the special menu was created by our team’s Head Chef. We were also contacted by a food writer by the Oxford Mail who agreed to interview us for our event.

By the night of our event we hosted for 65 people, we had other hospitality students working on our event (we have to work on other events too). I was working in the kitchen as the Healthy and Safety manager in the kitchen as well as looking after the dessert section on our event.

For a decoration around the restaurant we decided to ask some of Oxford Brookes Fine Art Students to contribute some artwork with regards to the fishing industry. Luckily there were quite a number of students that liked to paint and they contributed a number of stunning pieces which looked great in the restaurant on the night. Our artists also contributed by helping us set up all of the paintings and some even stayed to enjoy the event with us.

For our event we decided to have oysters as our canapés, both raw and battered (for those that don’t like them raw). For starters we had a sharing platter of lots of different fish in salads, as pates and on their own with homemade mayonnaise and bread. For our main course we did pan friend ling, which is a very, very underused fish which actually tastes just like cod. We served that with crab, crushed potatoes and wilted Kale, Spinach and Chard. The sauce was a caper beurre noisette which we drizzled on and around the fish.

We created a beach theme dessert which was a lemon sponge cake covered in gingerbread biscuits to look like a sandcastle. We then had a fish shaped shortbread biscuit, a blueberry seashell jelly and a starfish rhubarb ice cream. This was all served on a bed of creamy foam and blueberry puree to look like the sea.

Starter platter

Overall we had a really, really successful evening, everyone thoroughly enjoyed the meal and we even raised £400 from a raffle that we did for the Fisherman’s Mission, a charity which acts as financial support to fishermen that may have faced financial trouble during the heavy rain. We had a lot of prizes that could have been won including a signed book by Rick Stein, vouchers for Sophie’s Steakhouse and Sam’s Brasserie, a case of gin, vouchers for Peach Pubs, vouchers from Oxford’s Playhouse and a case of gin from Boodle’s in London.

We also gave away a flyer which included a recipe and a thank you note to all our supporters and donators to our raffle. The recipe used sustainably sourced mackerel to teach those who attend our event how they can continue to eat sustainably.

If you are interested in this event there are still a couple to go so give Brookes Restaurant a call and find out if there is still availability! Hoped you enjoyed reading this blog. My next blog I’ll be talking to you about how to survive that dreadful dissertation!