 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
Eat |
|
Prandial Pleasure - Serving up hope |
| FT Magazine, 10 September 2005 |
The Foyer is a sophisticated restaurant-gallery, brimming with light and shine. Oh yes – and it’s surrounded by supported accommodation, which shelters ex-homeless and disadvantaged young people, who also work there. The Foyer is a deliciously different dining experience. The restaurant is a trading arm of Aberdeen Foyer, who are, as they say, not just a roof over heads, but an ongoing training and educational facility for their clients. It’s not a tartan version of ‘Fifteen’ - it is staffed by professionals, but they take on disadvantaged people who are interested in working in the catering business, and train them to up to gain formal qualifications, with several recent notable successes. The result is a restaurant so unstuffy you can feel fresh air blowing through it like a gale . And is hardly a lentil sandwiches with hairshirt salad experience. To begin I had potato and onion tart, crisp on the outside and mellow on the in, scented sweetly of rosemary. I followed with a filo pastry filled with spicy vegetables, snuggled up with a date and apricot chutney. I then stole as much of my husband’s mushroom risotto as distraction would allow, followed by helpings from my children’s plates (the children’s menu has proper food on it, regurgitated dinosaur shapes clearly extinct.) And the desserts: I swear I heard angel wings flutter nearby. My white chocolate and raspberry brulee was intense and vast, and samples of rice pudding with cinnamon pear compot proved fragrant and sadly minimal, such was the owner’s hold on his plate once he realised what was happening. By now you’ll have missed that menu; for they change every six weeks along with the gallery installations. A corporate sponsor is affiliated to each ‘run’, who get a launch party as part of the deal. Meantime, the funds raised from the restaurant go back into the Foyer where it is used to educate and train the young people living above it. What more could you want? Oh yes, for, the children who noticed the fudge arriving with the adult’s coffee: a whole plateful of their own.
|