Meet the 2025 OFS Guest Chefs

Food and drink are vital elements of the Symposium; the lunch and dinner menus are designed to reflect and expand on the years topic. 

This year’s communal meals are masterminded by Meals Co-ordinator and Trustee Cameron Stauch, in collaboration with our guest chefs, and St Catherine’s College’s Executive Head Chef Tim Kelsey. 

GUEST CHEFS:

Chef Ana Ortiz specializes in Ecuadorean cuisine and fire cookery. Her menus authentically draw from her culture and heritage from the Galapagos to the Andean Highlands. With each menu Ana shares her exciting and vibrant char-grilled flavours. Ana has done sold out residencies at Carousel in London, and has cooked at HOLM and Babington House in Somerset, as well as Fire Bird in London.

Ana grew up on the Galapagos islands and her earliest memories of cooking are in her grandfather’s beautiful fire kitchen where they prepared traditional feasts for all the family. They slaughtered an animal on the farm and the family gathered to cook a nose to tail meal over fire. As a young child Ana was involved helping to stuff the morcillas or went fishing with her uncle. This period of her life ignited her passion for cooking and entertaining. Ana’s joy for cooking over fire was further fuelled by her father who became obsessed with Argentinian asado from his travels around South America with work and it soon become a Sunday ritual for the family.

It was this passion for fire cookery which inspired Ana and husband, Tom Bray, to start Fire Made in 2016 having moved to live in England. They run Fire Made from Somerset where they design and produce fire cookery equipment for chefs, restaurants, and consumers worldwide, as well as running experience days and training in all things asado. They are regularly popping up at restaurants and food festivals in the UK and globally to share how one can cook meat, fish and vegetables over fire in the most wonderful of ways.

Hanane Tancrede – Abdelli, is an author, culinary entrepreneur, and devoted mother of two children. Born in Algeria and raised in France, she shifted from a 12-year career as an actuary to explore and share her Algerian culinary heritage. Together with her mother Anissa, she opened MAMA NISSA, a restaurant and catering service in central Paris, focusing on fresh, local ingredients to create traditional Algerian dishes. Passionate about preserving and passing on her cultural legacy, they have published two cookbooks, “Goûts d’Algérie” in 2023 and “Easy Algérie” in 2025. 

Hanane will be celebrating the Algerian flavours through the lens of claypot/ tagine cookery at this year’s symposium.

Joannès Rivière was born and raised near Roanne, a small French town in the Loire, a region famous for its gastronomy. Joannès obsession with seasonality and farm-to-table eating began early, when he worked at the family restaurant run by his father, who also grew vegetables for the renowned Michelin three-star restaurant, La Maison Troisgros. After graduating from cooking school in France, Joannès worked as a pastry chef in the US for two years and learned an impressive amount of American slang.
In 2003 he moved to Siem Reap, Cambodia as a volunteer cooking teacher for the Sala Bai Hotel School focused on providing culinary skills for disadvantaged youth. During that period, he wrote the school’s cookbook, Cambodian Cooking. Next, Joannès spent five years as the executive chef at Siem Reap’s famed Hotel de la Paix. In 2011, along with his life and business partner Carole Salmon, he established Cuisine Wat Damnak. Fluent in Khmer, the couple have embraced their adopted country, its culture and its food. Their hard work has been rewarded with international critical acclaim, and the restaurant was named one of Asia’s 50 best restaurants. Cuisine Wat Damnak has become an institution in the Cambodian culinary scene. Joannès continues to inspire and teach a whole generation of Cambodian chefs and supports them in celebrating the rich diversity of Cambodian cuisine.

Artist Jennie Moran is this year’s Young Chefs mentor. Jennie will guide the Young Chefs following the philosophy of using hospitality to create opportunities for shared connection. Jennie started a unique art/food/hospitality project called Luncheonette in 2013 which operated as the canteen in NCAD in Dublin. She has written a book entitled ‘How to Soften Corners’ about hospitality. Her creative research is supported with an Arts Council bursary. She provides mentorship in holistic hospitality to creative organisations, lectures in universities and curates discursive events. She won Best Emerging Voice at the Irish Food Writing Awards and is featured in the Irish Independent’s Ones to Watch for 2025.

More about our plans in following posts…