The Grand Guide

Award-winning, celebrity chef, Paul Askew, and his expert team will once again recreate The Art School at Aintree Racecourse for the 2025 Randox Grand National Festival. This unmissable culinary experience features a six-course tasting menu complemented by a flight of fine wines all within view of the Parade Ring. In Chef Askew’s words: “The Grand National embraces everything that I love about gastronomy and hospitality”.

Discover the inspiration behind this unique collaboration and learn more about the artistry and passion Chef Askew brings to each dish in our exclusive Q&A.

My menus are always influenced by the quality of the seasonal ingredients. We spend so much time seeking out the very best that our region can produce. I like to show off the food cultural identity of the Liverpool city region and remind people of our world-class ingredients to go alongside world-class horseracing.

This year, as we focus on sustainability, we will introduce more foraged produce and Cheshire Wild Venison will be supplying ethically sourced fallow deer and hare for the new terrine created in our kitchens. This will sit alongside the introduction of a new scallop & Café de Paris butter dish.

Game is something that we love to cook with and will always remind me of the first ever visit to Aintree when Albert Roux was cooking a wonderful game and squab pigeon pithivier for Patrick Martel. I was so lucky to spend the day with him.

Mother Nature and seasonality is at the heart of every menu that is created by The Art School team. March and April bring a variety of new season produce from the region’s suppliers and farms, the best of which are developed into our menus. For prestigious events however, such as the Grand National meeting, we like to push the boat out a little and bring additional luxury touches to our menus.

The main ethos of The Art School remains the same: find the best local, seasonal produce and make the ingredients the star of the show by enhancing them with flavour, texture, special seasonings and techniques but never forgetting the importance of cooking with love.

The Grand National embraces everything that I love about gastronomy and hospitality. Being classically French trained, but loving and being inspired by modern Asian influences, I love the challenge and opportunity to prepare some of the industry’s most famous, time-honoured dishes in new and exciting ways.

Bringing diverse and wide-ranging cultural influences together and presenting them to both long-standing and new audiences, pairs perfectly with the Jockey Club ethos.

It’s all about keeping culinary and racing history current & vibrant to welcome and delight racegoers who attend religiously each year as well as guests attending for the first time. We need to ‘Wow’ people every time.

We have always steered away from ‘fads’ and the ‘smoke-and-mirror’ style of cooking. I opened The Art School with a vision that has slowly and subtly incorporated the emergence of the green revolution, global flavour influences, zero-waste & sustainable dining and local sourcing to name a few. We will continue to develop these ideas but will also be keeping an eye on future developments such as alternative proteins and the next generation of nutrient-rich superfoods. For now, the most popular innovation is the reinvention of ‘comfort food’, enriching it with bold, complex flavours and refined techniques. I can tell you that this is one trend close to my heart!

We never stop evolving and we always have a vegan menu available at the restaurant and constantly seek new ingredients to ensure that non-meat dishes are as exciting as the meat and fish dishes. This year we will be celebrating locally grown (in Southport) exotic species of mushrooms and foraged seaweeds foraged from Northern Ireland.

The table is the stage on which so much of life is set, from first dates to weddings, first homes to family dinners – and, of course, world-class racing. It is where we eat and drink, of course, but more than that, it is where we communicate. The big conversations – and subsequent decisions – happen between mouthfuls, amid the clatter of cutlery and plates. This is the essence of the kind of service I wanted my team to deliver when we first discussed service procedures 10 years back. Whilst we have refined what we do we strive to deliver to our guests a discreet, seamless service in the most comfortable, approachable manner.

We serve each guest with the same importance and love – always willing to go the extra mile. As the Jockey Club knows, when guests feel genuine care and hospitality they know and respond accordingly in their enjoyment. This is how great memories and atmosphere are created. As the great Sylvano Girardin, Maitre D’ of La Gavroche stated, ‘We are merchants of happiness….’