The Hoxton Apprentice, I learnt, was set up in 2004 by a charity called Training For Life, along with social entrepreneur Gordon D’Silva and one of my favourite chefs, Prue Leith. It gives professional training through a paid apprenticeship programme for the long-term unemployed, to help young people get into the hospitality industry.

Trainees do a structured work placement for a minimum of eight weeks in which they learn catering and hospitality skills, from stock control and food hygiene to dealing with difficult customers and wine-tasting. If successful in the initial training, they are taken on as paid apprentices to complete a four-six month term where the areas are looked at in more depth.

The restaurant has trained more than 750 people since 2004, with around 70% of those going into a permanent job within the sector – varying from top London restaurants to international hotel chains and even Buckingham Palace.
“It’s important that the training is relevant and thorough,” explained Nick Boland. “After leaving here, I’d expect our trainees to not only get a job in a bar or restaurant, but to be able to perhaps manage a small bar or similar by themselves in the future.”

Since coming here six months ago, Nick has overhauled the wine list to focus on organic and fair trade producers, and has beefed up the schedule of special events, including a Valentine’s cooking demonstration and – for the Julie Andrews fans among us – singalong Sound of Music nights.

The Blue Engineers

I met Nick at a ‘January Blues’ night with live music from John O’Reilly and The Blues Engineers, who entertained us while we were dining – with the saxophone player even wandering around the tables and behind the bar as he played, much to our amusement.

The Hoxton Apprentice’s kitchen and front-of-house teams are headed by an experienced professional, which means there’s no compromise on the quality of food. The blues night menu highlighted the restaurant’s new dishes for 2012, and I was able to try the chicken breast in lemon, thyme and garlic with parmentier potatoes, and a naughty butterscotch panna cotta with chilli pineapple. The cuisine is modern, simple European, with a selection of five starters (£5-£7); seven main courses (£10-£15); and four desserts £6); and I liked the sound of every single dish on the menu.

Having enjoyed my evening of live jazz in such intimate surroundings so much, I was saddened to hear from Nick that the restaurant faces a funding crisis that could put a potential question mark over its future survival. Training for Life is a registered charity and relies upon external funding to support this restaurant and its other social enterprises. Government cut-backs are, according to Nick, rather short-sighted: “If you just keep one person on welfare, they say it costs the government about £1.2million for their lifetime – how much better to help those people gain the skills and confidence they need to get back into full-time employment?”

Head chef Leon Seraphin

I couldn’t agree more – and hope the restaurant is able to weather the storm of the government’s funding cuts. If you’re in Hoxton looking for an affordable meal at a restaurant with a very interesting story, then pop in. I’m holding out for another Sound of Music singalong.

* www.hoxtonapprentice.com
* Check out sister restaurants Dartmouth Apprentice and Barking Apprentice
* To book The Blues Engineers, email manager Larry Pryce on Larry AT doverstreet.co.uk

The pub has a staggering list of awards and credentials, including being the only UK pub certified by the Soil Association; creator of the first fish policy to gain Marine Conservation Society approval; London Dining Pub winner in the Good Pub Guide three times; and winner of an RSPCA Ethical Business Award. Owner Geetie Singh received an MBE in 2009.

I wondered whether the Duke of Cambridge’s critical acclaim may have gone to its head and turned it into a pretentious gastropub (or that it might be so evangelically organic that I’d feel out of place not dressed from head-to-toe in hemp).

Happily, this was not the case at all. Being several hundred metres off Essex Road means the clientele has made a conscious effort to be there. Mismatched tables and chairs, candle-lighting and friendly staff make it cosy and welcoming, and I was fascinated by the shelves packed with homemade jars of pickles and preserves.

The pub’s commitment to locally-grown and organic produce is impressive: 80% of fresh produce comes from the Home Counties, and only those ingredients which are in season are used. Tea, coffee, chocolate and nuts are Fair Trade; wine, beer and soft drinks are organic; and the pub buys and uses entire animals, wasting nothing at all. Lesser-known, sustainably-caught fish like gurnard and pollack are preferred and only filtered tap water is served.

But something I was particularly interested to hear about was the Duke of Cambridge’s commitment to its local community. Chefs from the pub have trained the cooks at nearby Thornhill Primary School to create healthy menus of local produce. They have also worked with Kate Greenaway Nursery to create a community kitchen, and taught the pupils at Highbury Fields Secondary School to cook and serve healthy, organic dishes to their classmates. It’s this level of community-involvement that puts the Duke of Cambridge in a different league to some of London’s other excellent organic eateries, like Bumpkin and Daylesford Organic cafés, for me.

The pub’s insistence on seasonal produce means the menu changes twice a day, but you can download a sample menu for each season to give you an idea of the treats in store. On the menu on Thursday night was Stichelton and pear salad; duck with potatoes; sustainably-sourced mussels with white wine, cream and parsley; wild boar; quiche with Portobello mushrooms and beetroot salad and more. I plumped for crispy goose croquettes served with a spicy tomato salsa that cut through the richness of the goose perfectly. At £8-£12 for starters and £12-£22 for main courses, it is certainly not a cheap-eat. But if you’ll consider paying a premium to know where your steak or spinach came from, the D of C is definitely worth crossing the river for.

*See 4Food for articles on topics including food waste, Fairtrade food, and where to buy sustainable fish.

[My blog on TTG website, ttgdigital.com]

One of the most interesting events of WTM for me was the launch by Kuoni of the UK’s first Fair Trade-certified holiday.

Kuoni teamed up with Fair Trade in Tourism South Africa (FTTSA), which has been working to promote the importance of fair trade in tourism for a decade, in order to gain certification of all aspects of the supply chain on a 13-night South Africa package.

While the concept of fairly-traded cocoa or bananas is easy enough to comprehend, fairly-traded tourism is more complicated – which is perhaps why it’s taken until now for it to develop.

I asked FTTSA’s executive director Jennifer Seif what the Fair Trade stamp on Kuoni’s package holiday actually represents. She explained that all accommodation providers on the itinerary have been vetted to ensure their staff are paid a fair wage and have good working conditions, and that their suppliers are paid fairly.

Kuoni’s commitment to the accommodation and local ground-handlers it uses include paying 100% of its bills before a client travels, and paying cancellation fees if forced to cancel a booking. “There’s an unwritten rule that hotels don’t ask for the money, but it can be very hard on small businesses,” said Seif.

While a fair, minimum price can be put on commodities like bananas, Seif said this doesn’t work in tourism, as prices fluctuate so much. ”What we do instead is say you cannot push for a discount, and we demand a transparency so people know who is paying what,” she said.

The £2,995 price tag on Kuoni’s package also includes a $50-$60 ‘premium’ which goes into a separate fund, to be spent on socio-economic projects that benefit those involved in the supply chain. Seif hopes to soon have 20-30 operators like Kuoni bringing 5,000 clients to South Africa on this kind of Fair Trade package each year. “That’s three million rand, or about £250,000, of new money for development,” she says.

She acknowledged clients might not yet look for Fair Trade when booking their holiday. “But when they get there and hear about the Fair Trade ethos and feel good about staying there, that is when they tell their friends and the hotel benefits from word-of-mouth marketing and repeat business,” she explained.

Harriet Lamb, the UK’s executive director of The Fair Trade Foundation, said at the Kuoni/South Africa launch that consumers WILL pay more for fairly-traded holidays. “Of course people want a bargain but if you tell them these bananas -or this package holiday – is cheap because the people behind it aren’t getting a fair deal, people will pay more,” she said.

There’s a lot of cash-strapped UK consumers who right now are understandably reluctant to pay a penny more for a holiday than they absolutely have to.

But when she opened World Responsible Tourism Day on Wednesday, Harriet Lamb reminded us of how the Archbishop of York described our responsibility to support Fair Trade: “Fair trade is not charity. It’s justice”, he said.

And for the future of destinations like South Africa, where being paid fairly can be the means of a climbing out of poverty, I hope the vision of a global Fair Trade mark for tourism becomes a reality soon.

Federico Solano described a new scheme called Tour Operators Promoting Sustainability, or TOPS, for both local Latin American tourism companies and those sending customers from the UK and other countries.

After bringing together travel companies that have made a commitment to sustainable practices, the Alliance hopes to launch a group-wide marketing campaign, creating one of the world’s first networks of green-certified operators.

Twelve UK holiday companies already have contracts with the Rainforest Alliance in place, committing them to using accommodation and cruise companies that operate in a sustainable way. These include The Adventure Company, Exodus, Explore, Hands Up Holidays and Imaginative Traveller. Federico said UK companies have been among the most supportive of the Alliance’s work, and that he hopes they will all sign up to the TOPS platform.

I’m looking forward to seeing how the new TOPS project progresses, and hope to see lots more of the Rainforest Alliance on the UK travel trade circuit. Perhaps a UK consumer travel show, featuring only Rainforest Alliance partners, could be something for the not-too-distant future…

I got chance to meet a Rainforest Alliance-certified operator just yesterday. Costa Rican Horizontes Tours, which specialises in nature tours, has been working alongside the Rainforest Alliance for several years. Rodolfo Alvarez explained how the company uses certified hotels as much as possible, and how it has introduced volunteering projects, home-stays and tree-planting options to help its customers interact more with nature and with Costa Rica’s people. I won two nights at a Costa Rican yoga retreat so I hope I may get chance to go and explore the country’s wildlife for myself sometime soon!

It’s a hotel I first learnt about at World Travel Market last year, when it won the ‘best accommodation for the environment‘ category at the Responsible Tourism Awards.

As well as using 65% solar power and buying produce direct from local fishermen and farmers, one of the innovations that really stands out for me in this video is a local paper-making project, where the hotel gives shredded waste paper to local craftswomen to be turned into guest stationery – which the hotel then buys back. A perfect example of a project that is both environmentally conscious and socially beneficial! Watch the full story of how this hotel is breaking the mould in the Caribbean here.