Cookery Room Grand Opening!

QAS alumna Afiya Titus cuts the ribbon on the brand-new cookery room! Followed by an excellent student cooking masterclass.

On Thursday 2^nd March, the highly anticipated brand-new cookery room opened at Queen Anne’s School after significant refurbishment, with the help of Thomas Franks catering company. A group of students, staff, governors, and parents were joined by successful Queen Anne’s alumna Afiya Titus for its grand opening ceremony with a ribbon-cutting celebration. 

Afiya is a serial entrepreneur who founded Lime Hut, a Caribbean-inspired superfood company with a popular stall at the Berwick Street Food Market in London, as well as being the cofounder of Coco Financial. After graduating from an undergraduate degree at UCL, Afiya completed a graduate scheme at Deloitte and qualified as a chartered accountant. She then followed her passion for cooking delicious food with high nutritional value and began selling her food on a market stall in Soho. Collaborating with brands including Nike, Puma and SBTV, the Lime Hut brand brought contemporary Caribbean dishes to London with a focus on health and wellbeing.

Whilst running Lime Hut, Afiya met many female-founders who were passionate about their businesses but lacked knowledge and confidence on tackling the finance, tax and strategy element of entrepreneurship. This lead Afiya to set up Coco Financial, a financial service tailored to women to help propel their businesses forward and support typically under-represented people in business.

Afiya visited Queen Anne’s to celebrate the opening of the cookery room and do the honours of cutting the ribbon. Students who will be starting their GCSE in Food and Nutrition in September were treated to an amazing cookery masterclass by Afiya, where they prepared some Lime Hut-inspired dishes.  

What a fantastic space Queen Anne's pupils have with the new cookery room. We had so much fun cooking with the year 9 students - some of whom had never cooked before! But everyone got stuck in and made yummy Caribbean sweetcorn and plantain fritters. It felt pretty cool to share some of my own culture through cooking during what happened to be the school's own celebratory 'cultural awareness week'.

Afiya Titus

It was a delightful event with members of Caversham’s vegan restaurant, Vegivores, in attendance, alongside Queen Anne’s parents and governors.

Queen Anne’s would like to thank Afiya, Thomas Franks and all staff involved in the making of the state-of-the-art cookery room which will be a great learning facility for students for years to come. 

See more photos here.