Home comfort, gourmet dishes cooked up by Island-based ‘Wight Kitchen’are the flagship meals in Red Funnel’s brand new spring menu which is available now on the company’s Southampton-East Cowes route.
With a real focus on health and wellbeing, Red Funnel is now catering to those with food intolerances and offering tasty options for adults and children alike.
Chicken pot pie with seasonal vegetables, meatball and pasta bake, five vegetable vegetarian (and gluten free) lasagne and chicken curry (also gluten free) give an option for everyone, plus fish and chips, a Red Funnel favourite, will stay on the menu.
Soup flavours of carrot and coriander, spicy sweet potato, spring vegetable and pesto and tomato, lentil and chorizo also feature on the new menu and amazingly all are gluten free.
Children’s menu options will include a crust-less quiche in either ham and cheese flavour or ‘Hidden Vegetable’ flavour – a fab way to get those five a day into your picky kids.
Wight Kitchen is run by 32-year-old Lauren Morton, who moved to the Island just 3 years ago from Southport, and she is ably abetted by her very experienced ‘Island-born and bred’ executive chef Lee Jeffrey.
Brought up in the catering trade as her parents own several hotels and restaurants in the Southport area, Lauren successfully co-ran one of those restaurants before moving to the Island in 2012. She then started Wight Kitchen and began looking for customers.
Lauren said:
“We’ve met all of the directors of Red Funnel and they are pushing as much as they can for local produce and local producers and we’re based on the Island and probably use between 70 and 80 per cent local ingredients.
“For Red Funnel we developed a large choice and narrowed it down through board tastings and customer tastings.
“We’ve grown immensely since working with Red Funnel. It’s a big chunk of our work. We had to take on two more people and others part time.”
Lee has catered to the rich and famous, including Prince Andrew and Sarah Fergusson, in his 23-year career. He said:
“When I was training at the Isle of Wight College I did VIP events at Buckingham Palace, The Albert Hall, The Guildhall, Earls Court, Wentworth and Twickenham and was then personally selected to work inAzerbaijan, looking after VIP delegates”.
The duo recently came on board Red Funnel sailings so that Lee could help the kitchen staff with the preparation of the new dishes. Little secrets like turning the oven up a few degrees to get the right puffiness of the puff pastry tops for the chicken pot pie were explained so that everything would be just perfect.
Lucky passengers on the sailings got to try tasters of the new menu and the feedback was very positive.
Supplying the Island’s Co-ops with their soups, pates and cakes, Wight Kitchen now supplies Robin Hill and the new Tapnell Farm with their yummy food as well.
