Samphire’s staff have swapped the restaurant kitchen for care homes as they take on temporary secondments with LV Care Group.
The Jersey restaurant, previously known as Ormer, is currently closed due to the Covid-19 outbreak. However, its head chef, Tommy Radiguet, will now be managing the kitchen at St Joseph’s care home, where he will be designing new menus to rollout across the LV Care Group homes.
He will also work with the existing executive head chef to put together recipe folders, allergy lists and new spreadsheets that can be used across the homes to ensure better delivery of food service to the residents.
Tommy will be joined by 10 members of his Samphire kitchen team, who also will be provisionally employed in catering or domestic care roles.
‘I am really pleased to have been offered this opportunity to continue working and will use my experience to assist the kitchen teams in streamlining their menus and enabling more variety, balance and nutritious options. I will also offer the team training by teaching them the basics of the new menus we will create, and ways to enable them to run more efficiently in the future,’ said Tommy, who studied at Highlands College before becoming an apprentice at Ormer under Shaun Rankin.
‘We hope to offer nutritional talks to the residents but will do so under the strict guidelines of social distancing. The safety and wellbeing of the residents is paramount, and we want to play our part in making their experience of lockdown in the home more enjoyable where we can.’
Nick Bettany, CEO of LV Care Group, said he was delighted to welcome Tommy’s culinary expertise to St Joseph’s, and the contribution of his kitchen staff to the smooth running of operations in the coming months.
‘In the wake of such difficult times, particularly the economic impact on local businesses and workers, we are pleased we are able to offer the Samphire kitchen team temporary work and know their involvement will be instrumental in ensuring we continue to offer a very high standard of care to all of our residents during these challenging times,’ he said.
