Winners at the Food & Drink Award
We’re thrilled to announce that we won ‘Pub of the Year’ at the Surrey Life Food & Drink Awards 2017, and would like to thank all our fabulous customers, both for voting and for your ongoing support.
Being ‘one of the top foodie events in the Surrey calendar’, The Surrey Life Awards is a prestigious event that was launched in 2013.
The awards recognise the county’s food and drink industry and promotes its continuous growth to put Surrey well and truly on the foodie map. Surrey is known for its culture, rich history, and heritage as well as supplying high quality produce to locals and visitors across the county; so when given the opportunity, we leapt at the chance to be involved.
He’ll be the judge of that
Thanks to you, our customers who voted for us, we were shortlisted as finalists in the penultimate award, ‘Pub of the Year’, up against two other pubs. We then awaited one of the Surrey Life judges who visited the pub anonymously to put us through our paces and judge The Cock Inn against strict criteria.
The judge for the category was Christopher Moore, Chief executive of The Clink Charity, which operates fine dining training restaurants and gardens within UK prisons.
After training as a chef, Christopher won a scholarship to go to New York with Holiday Inn to join its management training programme. On returning to the UK, he joined Harrods and then Fenwick where he headed up the restaurants, before becoming Chief executive of The Clink.
Christopher is also Vice Chair of the Institute of Hospitality and a Non-Executive Director of Westminster Abbey Enterprises.
The event itself
The award evening, which took place at the beautiful Foxhills Club & Resort on Thursday 21st September 2017, was an all-round fabulous event. Surrounded in a room with some of Surrey’s top suppliers, chefs, pubs and restaurants, we enjoyed an evening hosted by the BBC’s Nicholas Owen and other influential faces in the food and drink industry.
It was a delight to share a room with so many other significant businesses in our industry, including a few of our fantastic suppliers who were also finalists in other categories.
Secretts in Milford, a business that has been running since 1979, supply us and our sister pubs with their home-grown produce and were shortlisted for ‘Farm Shop of the Year’; Albury Vineyard, who we work closely with to develop our high-quality wine lists, was also voted as finalists in the ‘Food & Drink Producer’ category.
We also congratulated Silent Pool Distillers, the suppliers of our ever so popular Silent Pool Gin. Silent Pool took home the award for ‘Food and Drink Innovation’. Congratulations to all our suppliers on these brilliant achievements!
Photo by Pete Gardner for Surrey Life
A ‘thank you’ from us
“This award is a huge testament to the hard work and passion shown by our Pub Manager Danni, Head Chef Kevin and the team. We like to keep things simple and let the quality of our food and drink speak for itself. We believe that using fresh ingredients that have travelled as little distance helps ensure our food consistently tastes great and we’re proud to serve such a wide range of locally-brewed ales.” says operations director, Mark Williams.
“On behalf of all the team, we are delighted to have won this incredible title and would like to thank all our customers who kindly voted for us.”