Venue-Elior was introduced ahead of its launch later this month to a crowd of event bookers at Lloyds of London last week.
Headed by the unlikely sounding Scot, Raymond Santamaria, the service will offer 40 prestigious venues to event bookers to hire, such as Kempton Park, with catering provided by incumbent Elior UK.
But Kitchen Rat hears Santamaria, now UK marketing manager for Venue-Elior, has taken an even more unlikely career path to reach his current position than his unusual surname suggests.
In a real world case of "you're hired!" rather than "you're fired", the marketing manager came to Elior via a pilot for a non-commissioned BBC show Head Hunters.
Rather than survive the barracking of deranged Chelsea football fans, Santamaria instead impressed a panel of "industry experts" during a gruelling day of filming at London's Canary Wharf last year and beat eight competitors to do what Ruth Badger failed on the Apprentice and win a dream job, in this case with Elior developing a venue finding idea they'd had.
Although the caterer ended up losing out on a potentially lucrative TV series as it wasn't taken any further, they gained Santamaria who nine months on has seen through the Venue-Elior vision and launched a business venture that Alan Sugar would approve of.
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