This year is a milestone year for Rachel Demuth.
It marks 30 years since she first opened her business in Bath, and during those three decades she has not only firmly cemented her place among the city's gastronomic elite, but also earned national recognition for her vegetarian cuisine.
"I can't believe how long it's been," says Rachel from her office at Demuths Vegetarian Cookery School on Terrace Walk. "It's amazing really."
The cookery school is her third venture in the city. She opened the Broad Street Bakery in 1984 when she was just 26. "In a sense it was before it's time," says Rachel. "Now you can get fantastic bread, but back then no-one else was making sourdoughs or anything like that."
Just three years later she opened Demuths on North Parade Passage, as a coffee house with a shop at the front selling goods from the bakery.
"We had the second Capuccino machine in Bath," she reminisces. "We were so excited about coffee that we went all the way to Seattle to look at the coffee shops, and we went to the first Starbucks."
When she sold the bakery in 1993, Demuths stopped selling the bakery goods and became a vegetarian restaurant which soon became a Mecca for vegetarians all over the country who travelled to Bath to taste Rachel's innovative dishes. Keen to build on that success and to share her knowledge, the cookery school opened in 2000, initially run from Rachel's home before moving to its current home in 2010.
But last June marked the end of an era when Rachel decided to sell the restaurant in order to concentrate on teaching.
"It was the right time to move on," she says. "It needed someone young to put energy into it and make it their own.
"I had been concentrating on the cookery school for a long time and in order for a restaurant to be successful you really need to live and breathe it 24/7."
Demuths Vegetarian Cookery School has established itself as one of the best cookery schools in the UK, winning many awards and attracting top chefs to hold masterclasses.
"I think it's important to have a USP," says Rachel. "And ours is cooking with vegetables.
"The people who come aren't necessarily vegetarians - maybe they have a vegetarian in the family, or they want to eat more healthily, or they just want to find out what you can do with vegetables.
"Vegetables are so wonderful and colourful and flavoursome but so often they are just put on the side of the plate.
"If I could do one thing it would be to encourage chefs to put vegetables at the centre of the plate and give them as much importance as the meat or fish.
"Vegetarian cooking has improved extraordinarily over the past 30 years - just in the number of restaurants and the choices available.
"In Bath there are three great vegetarian places to eat - Acorn restaurant, Green Rocket Cafe and the Chapel Arts Centre - and if you go to the high end restaurants like the Bath Priory or Menu Gordon Jones you can get a fantastic vegetarian tasting menu, but there is still a lot of improvement to be made in the gastro pub sort of market so even in 2014 eating out as a vegetarian can be a challenge.
"It's not difficult in the sense that everywhere has a vegetarian option but it is always at the bottom of the list and you feel that it has had a loss less thought and attention than the other dishes on the menu.
"My heart sinks when I see a risotto or goat's cheese - it's what everyone does.
"The vegetarian choice should be as interesting and exciting as any other dish."
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