London restaurateur serves up training opportunities for underprivileged teenagers

Otto's restaurant is a chefs’ favourite: an eccentric den of pressed duck and Champagne cocktails and not, perhaps, the obvious first choice as a canteen for the NHS.

But when Covid hit, Otto Tepasse and partner Elin Hansen kept the Grays Inn Road kitchen open and became one of the first places delivering daily meals to hospital workers — in their case, ICU staff at St Thomas’.

With fewer cases for medics to cope with, their deliveries are no longer needed.

But next week the restaurateur — not the idle type — is launching a new campaign, welcoming underprivileged teenagers from Fulham and Hammersmith into his restaurant, where he will teach them to cook.

Otto and Elin will sell the dishes as takeaway and donate whatever is raised to the council’s youth homelessness and drug-addiction schemes.

A full-time apprenticeship scheme is on the horizon.