81. Great British Menu To Return Fronted By A Comedian.

 It was announced recently that BBC2’s annual Great British Menu will return to our television screens this spring for its fifteenth series with some changes made to it. For the first time the programme will be hosted - by the comedian Susan Calman  - which will inject a piece of downmarket triteness (and somewhere no doubt inclusivity with which the BBC is currently obsessed) not previously witnessed in the history of GBM.
  The already rather stretched competitors will also now be expected to deliver 6 courses with an amuse bouche and a pre-dessert being added to the list of their labours. I assume that this gives 6 chefs the chance to present a dish at the final Banquet which this year has a children’s literature theme. Well, that is probably appropriate. Sometimes one wonders if fine dining really is something like a Mad Hatter’s tea party and it’s true that the BBC really is the nearest thing that we British have to a modern-day Wonderland

Andy Waters

  One question I recently realised that I needed to ask myself was “what happened to Andy Waters?”.
  Andy Waters had had links with Birmingham and the West Midlands for a long time. He started work as a commis chef at Chewton Glen in Hampshire and then came to Birmingham to work at The Plough and Harrow in Edgbaston for 8 years. Subsequently he worked under Paul Bocuse in Lyon in France and then returned to the West Midlands to work at Simpsons when it was situated in Kenilworth and where he was working with Glynn Purnell and Luke Tipping and then opened his own restaurant, Edmund’s (named after his late father who had died tragically at the age of 32), firstly in Henley in Arden in 2002 and later, in 2009, moving it to Brindley Place in Birmingham city centre. He also opened a restaurant at The Queen’s in Belbroughton in Worcestershire.
  Waters sold Edmund’s in 2012 - it became Edmunds Bistro de Luxe with Didier Philpott as Head Chef (he had been Head Chef at his own Toque D’Or in the building in the Jewellery Quarter that was subsequently to become the present home to Alex Claridge’s The Wilderness) - and opened a new restaurant, Waters On The Square, at Five Ways in 2012. However he closed this in 2014 after being approached by Genting Group to become Head Chef in a restaurant it was opening at Resort World at the National Exhibition Centre near Birmingham Airport. The new restaurant was named Andy Waters. Waters ended his association with the restaurant in November 2018 and Aaron Darnley became the new Head Chef there, the restaurant’s name being changed to Sky By Waters.

Didier Philpott at the renamed Edmund’s Bistro de Luxe

 Andy Waters took up the post of Head Chef at Pebble Beach restaurant in Barton on Sea in Hampshire in October 2019 where his menu features modern British dishes.