First-ever Dorchester Collection Fashion Prize, debut of Luxury Traveler handbag by Louise Hempleman, and new hat collections by Fashion Ambassador Stephen Jones make the year ahead the group's most fashionable yet.

Luxury hotel brand Dorchester Collection is set to open a new 69-room country house hotel, to be called Coworth Park, near Ascot and bordering on Windsor Great Park in Surrey. The hotel, which stands in 200 acres of parkland, will also boast an equestrian center with stabling for up to 40 horses, as well as two polo fields and a practice field.

Scheduled to open in 2010, Coworth Park will be the 9th property in the Collection. The current portfolio of iconic hotels includes The Dorchester in London, The Beverly Hills Hotel in Beverly Hills, Le Meurice and Hotel Plaza Athénée in Paris, the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan, The New York Palace in New York, and Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles.

Best Business Hotel in London in 2008. - US Travel & Leisure Magazine

Best Hotel in England 2008 US Travel & Leisure Magazine

December 2008 – The Dorchester, one of the Dorchester Collection, has won a second award from leading US travel magazine, Travel + Leisure. In the magazine’s high profile T+ L 500 list, which names the best 500 hotels in the world, The Dorchester was named the finest hotel in England. The magazine made particular mention of the “excellent service” and “spacious and charmingly designed rooms” and described the hotel as “reassuringly exclusive”.

This is the second award The Dorchester has won in the last 2 months. Travel + Leisure’s annual Guide to Business Travel allows their readers to vote for the hotels in major cities around the world that best serve the needs of business travelers. The Dorchester was named the Best Business Hotel 2008 in London.

After 100 years, Britain is still the place for original oriental food, says Adam Edwards

Next week, as our Olympians prepare to wave the flag at the opening ceremony of the 2008 games at Beijing's "Bird's Nest" stadium, a lower profile celebration will occur in London. Not only is it 100 years since the British capital first hosted the Games, it is also a century since the first Chinese restaurant in these islands opened its doors.

Ching-He Huang: 'There's nothing more British than a chinese restaurant'

That first dish was served to curious London diners in 1908. Since then, the Chinese restaurant has become an integral part of most of our lives.

It was that summer that Chung Koon, formerly a ship's chef on the Red Funnel Line, opened Maxim's in Soho, the first mainstream Chinese restaurant in Britain. The food was Cantonese and the most popular dish was pork in a sweet and sour sauce called "jarjow".

But it was not until after the Second World War that the Chinese restaurant emerged as an integral part of our national life. Its genesis was the result of the British government recognition of Mao Tse-tung's Communist regime stranding scores of staff at the Chinese Embassy in London. Some, including the diplomat Kenneth Lo, opened restaurants in Soho.

A decade later, in 1958, Chung Koon's son, John, opened the Lotus House in Queensway, Bayswater. This was so popular that customers who couldn't get a table asked for food to take away. Thus it became the first take-away in Britain. That same year, Billy Butlin introduced chop suey and chips in his holiday camps, turning what had been an exotic food into an English high street staple.

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Today our love affair with Chinese food shows no signs of waning. According to recent figures from the Restaurant Association, Britons eat more than 110 million Chinese meals a year, while a survey earlier this year from the food company Amoy found that three out of five Britons said that their favourite food was Chinese.

"The Chinese restaurant is part of modern British life," says Ching-He Huang (pictured above), host of the current BBC2 series Chinese Food Made Easy. "Everyone talks of having a 'Chinese' on a Friday or Saturday evening," she says. "The food may often be Anglicised and not representative of all of China, where there are more than 50 different regional foods, but there is a place for everything in our cuisine." Now, as the sweet and sour restaurateurs celebrate the centenary of "The Chinese", it is beginning to change.

"The food is getting more authentic, more regional and more sophisticated," says Alan Yau, proprietor of London's stylish Hakkasan.

"Chinese food has not changed very much over the past 20 years. But now chefs are moving on. They are using healthier food and making mainstream cuisine much more discerning." Sir David Tang, owner of China Tang in London's Dorchester Hotel, agrees that there is now a broader acceptance of what he calls "the non-standard chop suey food".

Luxury hotel group Dorchester Collection has appointed Draft FCB as its first advertising agency ahead of a celebrity-led campaign later this year.

Draft won the £2.1m account after a three-way pitch against two undisclosed agencies. It has also appointed Initiative to handle media planning and buying.

Dorchester Collection is a portfolio of five luxury hotels - The Dorchester in London, The Beverly Hills Hotel in Los Angeles, Le Meurice and the Hotel Plaza Athénée in Paris and the Hotel Principe di Savoia in Milan. All five are owned by the Brunei Investment Agency.