Catering for royalty at Ascot Racecourse with Sodexo Live!
Gemma Amor, the executive chef for Ascot Racecourse, has one of the most exciting jobs in Sodexo Live!’s culinary universe. She oversees a historic venue that’s over 300 years old, where serving royalty is all in a day’s work. We caught up with Amor to talk about how she crafts the menu for race day, her team’s sustainability efforts and benefiting from the bounties of Windsor Castle.
Interviewer: How did you become interested in a career in the culinary arts?
Gemma: I've always wanted to be a chef. I'm one of seven children, the eldest. Being part of that with my mother and cooking for all the children in the family made me want to become a chef. So, I took cooking at school and then went on to college.
While I was at college, I successfully got awarded a programme for Sodexo as work experience, and that was in 1996. So, my first-ever event was at Royal Ascot. I got the bug for that type of catering. But I did try some hotels and restaurant work, and I went back to college for a further two years and successfully achieved an NVQ in patisserie and confectionery, but I felt that it wasn't quite the path I wanted to take.
I then carried on working on a sort of casual basis for Sodexo, and then I was lucky enough to be awarded a commis chef [junior chef] job in 1998, and I worked my way through the ranks. And I'm now executive chef for Ascot Racecourse.
Interviewer: Walk us through what your day is like.
Gemma: My day-to-day is continuous planning. Ascot is a world-class, unique venue. Every day is different - we do conferences and events. Obviously, we do racing. We also entertain the royals quite a bit because it's part of the Crown Estate. My day-to-day working is very much office-based - developing all the menus and the offers that we're going to serve throughout the year at the racecourse.
Interviewer: What is your philosophy when it comes to creating menus?
Gemma: I think, for me, it's what people are going to enjoy, not what I'm going to enjoy. I want people to come away from the racecourse and think, “Wow, we could have had that in a Michelin-star restaurant.” At Ascot Racecourse, our fine dining experience is like nowhere else. We are up there with some of the Michelin-star chefs with what we deliver. But I also think that it's about a well-balanced meal. And we're very much now introducing a lot of plant-based ingredients. For the last four years, we've served plant-based vegetarian offers across the whole site. It’s also about ingredients that people don't necessarily cook at home. We incorporate that into our menus.
Interviewer: There is definitely a movement toward having more plant-based options now.
Gemma: In our sector, we were the first to go plant-based. We were one of the first racecourse and stadiums to launch it, and it’s been very well-received. We try to incorporate the basics and make it an enjoyable meal.
Interviewer: What has your experience been like working as a chef for Sodexo Live!?
Gemma: I think for me, it’s very much about the opportunities. I am dyslexic and I did struggle quite a bit with my writing, but at Sodexo, they've helped me the whole way through my career. Being a female and being responsible for what I’m responsible for is outstanding, but I couldn't have gotten here without the support of Sodexo - the different training courses, the ability to work with celebrity chefs, the ability to go and work with different people from different sectors of the business. I think they're phenomenal, how they invest in their people. Because without them, I probably couldn’t have gotten where I am.
Interviewer: Sodexo as a company puts a lot of emphasis on working with local farmers and purveyors. How do you incorporate this into your role?
Gemma: We are lucky enough that we work with the royal estate. Ascot Racecourse is in the grounds of Windsor Castle, so we have the opportunity to work with the Windsor estate. We will get meat from them; we work with the Highgrove estate and get all our preserves from them, and we work with some local cheese suppliers. Together with Ben Dutson, Sodexo Live! food innovation director, we developed our own cheese for Royal Ascot. We are very keen on seasonality and keeping it as local as it can be.
Interviewer: How do you address the issue of sustainability?
Gemma: We don't use any single-use plastics on site. We use a system called reCUP. All alcoholic beverages will also be in a cup that can be rewashed. We're looking at composters that will go into an area so we can compost our food waste; at the moment our waste goes to biofuel anyway. We're also starting to look at some area to create our own farm where we can start growing foods for certain restaurants.
Interviewer: You’ve been in your position at the Ascot Racecourse for a while. Who has been the most exciting person you’ve cooked for?
Gemma: Probably the Queen. And we were extremely lucky that, in 2011, we had the tercentenary of the racecourse. So that’s 300 years, and we got to go to Windsor Castle and cook for the Queen and a banquet for 300 in the grounds, in the old original kitchens. I mean, we cook for celebrities all the time and I've been extremely lucky to be able to work with celebrity chefs throughout my career, but the Queen is definitely the most exciting.