The Tanoa Hotel Group’s premiere annual culinary event – the Tanoa Salon Culinaire – kicks off today.

The culinary fair, an inter-hotel event, is a memento of celebrating eight years of Tanoa culinary and hospitality experience, adventure and journey!

The various teams from the group will be presenting their ideas, creativity and unique passion for cuisine competing to come out the best from the best.

A unique aspect of this year’s two-day event will be the participation by Tanoa Tusitala Hotel Samoa.

The Samoan arm, for the first time since 2011 when it opened, had its own chef’s competition in March and two of their chefs will be competing at the event.

This is indeed a testament of the Tanoa Hotel Group’s commitment to training and development of its people.

The Salon Culinaire commenced at a small scale as a three-hour competition part of the Tanoa Hospitality championship, another Tanoa premiere event.

It was not until 2013 when it grew from a short three hour competition to a fully-fledged, two days culinary fair giving rise to the Tanoa Salon Culinaire.

The culinary fair is about our people and for our people, described Alamgeer Shah, Reddy Group Training and Development manager.

Mr Shah said this is a truly unique culinary fair and an exceptional training and development initiative.

“Such events are about recognising the talent we have, acknowledging it, and reinforcing their abilities by providing them the appropriate platform to display their skills and flair,” he said.

“And who says a little competition internally is a bad thing…fun and games apart, this event is a true test of skills and competency.

“It provides the opportunity to test our chefs and budding chefs, and at the same time train and develop the newer or budding chefs, hence, a win-win situation for all.”

Mr Shah said their judging criteria are aligned to the international judging standards and so the competition is surely not easy.

All judges will be external and no internal judges will be present.

A platform

Tanoa Hotel Group Development chef, Sainivalati Toanivalu, said they use the event as the platform to select their competitors for the National Moffat Salon Culinaire competition organised by the Fiji Chefs Association.

“We see it as a unique thing in that, it is perhaps most transparent and fair selection process, and our chefs receive training and further development at the same time,” he said.

Feedback: rachnal@fijisun.com.fj