UFO Info Week-End

There’s no problem convincing young people that working in restaurants is glamorous said

“There’s no problem convincing young people that working in restaurants is glamorous,” said Joel Kissin, managing director of Conran Restaurants “In the Sixties, the job to have was to be a photographer. Other restaurants, including the Atlantic Bar and Grill and Sir Terence Conran’s Mezzo, have recruited many of their waiters and chefs from continental Europe. It found its brasserie head chef, Cait Mitchell Hill, and her deputy, Simon Arkless, through an ad in the Sydney Morning Herald. Staff are entitled to a discount card after six months of service, entitling them to a third off goods at the Knightsbridge store.Like many other London restaurants, Harvey Nichols went abroad for its recruits. Membership of gyms, accommodation and loyalty bonuses are among other attractions.Take Harvey Nichols’s new restaurant at the converted Oxo tower on the South Bank. Places to eat, from cafe bars to restaurants with superstar chefs, have in the past three years been opening at an unprecedented pace in the capital. The result – an acute shortage of staff and fast-rising wages bills.
Higher pay is not the only reward that front-of-house and kitchen personnel are enjoying.

“The following morning I had Chessball on my mind.”Mr Gramolt is offering his new game to mail-order customers for pounds 149, or pounds 129 during an introductory offer.He says: “I know there are chess people so obsessed they wouldn’t want to waste their time with anything else. But I wouldn’t want Chessball to be killed off by someone saying ‘It’s not real chess’.”. They are a restaurant’s essential ingredient, and suddenly they’re in short supply. Waiters, sommeliers and chefs – be they commis, sous or de parti – are in demand as never before by London’s booming restaurants. But it’s quite a specialised interest.”Mr Gramolt was inspired to create his new board on a ferry crossing from Newhaven to Dieppe in 1985. He and his son played battleships on the red and white gingham tablecloths.

“I’ve got Tri-Chess for three players, and I used to have Three-Dimensional chess. Not one of them took off.John Wareing, owner of The Chess Shop near Olympia, says he only has one variant available. British Grand Master Nigel Short believes variants have little appeal.”History is littered with people trying to improve it, but chess is a very rich game, almost infinite in its complexity.”On this, Mr Short is at odds with the former world champion Bobby Fischer, who recently launched a variant called Fischerandom, in which the back row pieces are placed on the wrong squares.The Encyclopedia of Chess Variants by David Pritchard lists 1,450 modifications, from three- dimensional chess to four- player chess, with pieces from wildebeests to nuclear warheads There are five spherical chess boards listed. “I wanted to put together the optimum business.”But he faces a tough battle. From their starting positions on opposite sides of the sphere, magnetic bishops and knights poke out like the spines on a Second World War naval mine.
There are almost twice as many spaces as an ordinary board, but the same number of pieces, and it is, its creator believes, a far more attacking game.Mr Gramolt, a management consultant from Hartfield, East Sussex, hopes this latest variation on the ancient game of chess will make him rich “I wanted to put what I preach into practice,” he says. Mounted on a Corinthian column, the Chessball resembles a black and white enamelled globe, marked off in lines of latitude and longitude.

The tables at Cafe Baroque near Covent Garden in London have supported lots of chess boards – it is a well known haven for casual pawn- pushers – but none has looked so strange as the one William Gramolt brought in recently. It will next emerge, restored for the cameras, on 30 November, St Andrew’s Day.With the care and respect normally reserved for the deceased, the stone, which has featured in the coronation of some 30 British monarchs, will begin the last stage, from Holyroodhouse to St Giles’ Cathedral.It will then be escorted inside for a service of dedication before being gently borne into Edinburgh Castle, where tourists and patriotic Scots may pay pounds 5.50 to see it.. Once safely back on Scottish soil the stone is to be taken to an Historic Scotland laboratory for “refurbishment”. It will travel in the back of “a vehicle of suitable dignity” in a wooden travelling case.It is thought the route through England will eschew motorways and the last leg will take it towards the bridge across the River Tweed – the boundary between the two countries.Waiting on the north side of the bridge to welcome back the relic which was pillaged by King Edward I in 1296, in addition to local MPs and dignitaries, will be an honour guard of soldiers.The decision to involve the military has sparked intense lobbying between the Scottish regiments for the privilege of escorting the mystical masonry on its way to its new home.