Daily news update: our selection of food and chef news from the worlds press

St Ives hotel given £500,000 of lottery funding

A hotel in Cornwall has been awarded more than £500,000 of lottery cash to help regenerate the area. The £525,000 for the Carbis Bay Hotel, St Ives, has been granted by the Big Lottery's Coastal Communities Fund. The hotel said the money would go towards the creation of a water sports centre, conference and wedding venue, restaurant, plus a new community hub.

New food porn index shows the top food hashtags on Twitter, Instagram

Bolthouse Farms, a farm that makes bottled juices and dressings, decided to study our food viewing habits, and it created what it calls the Food Porn Index. It's a site that monitors social media conversations and mentions of certain food hashtags in 24 categories on Twitter and Instagram. The site updates every 15 minutes with the total mentions of a food such as #pizza or #carrot. Read more from LA Times

Inside Hampton Court's forgotten chocolate kitchen

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300 years languishing as a store room, Hampton Court's chocolate kitchen is open for business once more and the palace's archaeologists are discovering what it's like to make a mug of cocoa wearing a wig. When your palace has 1,600 rooms, it's easy to mislay a chocolate kitchen or two. "People used to point and say, 'Oh it was over there somewhere,'" says Marc Meltonville, food historian at Hampton Court, "but no one knew for sure." Read more from The Telegraph

Is railway-station food finally getting good?

Rejoice, rail users. Maybe. The news that the restaurant chain Giraffe is about to open its first Kiosk at London King's Cross station may not set your pulse racing. What is significant, however, is that the Tesco-owned chain is now targeting travel hubs in its expansion plans. It is merely the latest in a series of indicators that the quality of food and drink at British train stations may, finally, be on the up. Read more from The Guardian

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