The Australian, Entrepreneur

ONCE, the only way to find a business on the move was to call a directory on a mobile phone. But the arrival on July 11 of Apple iPhone — it is 3G, has WiFi and is GPS-enabled and integrated with Google Maps — is about to change the way people use mobile devices and find businesses through map-based online listings.

The big difference is that, through Google Maps on an iPhone, users can search for a business near their location either through 3G networks or WiFi. Because the iPhone geolocates the user’s position, Google Maps can give directions to find nearby businesses and services.

Other search engines and mobile phones can do this. But Google is the market leader in search and to date no device has had the large screen, interface or marketing pulling power of Apple to capture the public’s imagination.

Mark Armstrong, Google’s Melbourne-based head of automotive, local and classifieds, says what has held back mobile search in Australia is high costs and clunky phone interfaces. He says the iPhone in the US has proved to be one of the most popular mobile internet devices, with many new business opportunities emerging.

In Australia, imported iPhones and iPod Touches, apart from laptop computers, are already among the most popular mobile devices accessing WiFi networks, according to Ruwan Weerasooriya chief executive of Cafescreen, a company providing free WiFi in cafes. “If you take out all the laptops, the iPhone is the single most used device on the network. Given that it has not yet been released and it has been hacked, it is quite surprising,” he says. “We are looking forward to that product hitting the market as it will fundamentally change how people interact with content on the move.”

Even Nokia, which has some 300 WiFi hotspots for its N-series WiFi-enabled phones, is excited about the arrival as it will help build the profile of the mobile content market as a whole. Spokeswoman Louise Ingram says: “We think it is very exciting that the iPhone is coming because it helps focus the market.”

The arrival of the GPS-enabled iPhone is another step towards the convergence. Ingram says: “In very broad terms we are on the cusp of very exciting times with this area. We are seeing a lot of converging technologies. People then take them and use them for different things, especially small businesses. They really quite quickly grasp affordable and easy ways to use existing devices.”

The sort of service that mobile web surfers access, in addition to entertainment, is Google’s online map-based directory. Mobile web surfers can search for these listings through either 3G or WiFi and find relevant results to where they are located, thanks to the inbuilt GPS in the device. While these services are fairly simple, in the US social listings directories using GPS are already emerging.

Last year, Google joined hands with True Local (truelocal.com.au), a News Limited online business directory, which can be accessed through such searches. Google also has its Local Business Centre listing, which usually has a link displayed on the left of the Google maps page.

The free listing allows companies to add their contact details for multiple locations, upload pictures and videos and include online vouchers. For the vouchers, businesses simply specify an offer and a use-by date and users can print them off for redemption (although this is awkward on the move).

Armstrong says: “A business can claim its own location, but if a location is wrong or information is out of date, users can update information. It is a great concept, it really is opening up to the community or the wisdom of crowds to keep information fresh and up to date and to enrich it with reviews and personal experiences.”

Cafescreen’s core business model is providing advertising screens to cafes in exchange for free WiFi. The idea is that people could watch the content and advertising while they waited for their takeaway coffee. Weerasooriya says the public is warming to free WiFi and expects much greater demand for it with the arrival of the latest iteration of the iPhone.

“We certainly see a lot of interest in the WiFi. While it’s not the core business model it is certainly a ‘watch this space’ part of the business,” he says.

Perhaps an indication of the future is the direction Nokia, the world’s largest handset manufacturer, is taking. It is in the process of becoming an internet company that provides content. “We know that the future is not just in devices but service,” Ingram says.

Ed Charles dishes up the latest on Melbourne’s food and wine

McConnell’s moves
Chef Andrew McConnell this month steps down as executive chef of Circa, the Prince to concentrate on his latest ventures. The imminent launch of his all-day breakfast cafe and wine room, Cumulus Inc on Flinders Lane, and the move of his restaurant Three, One, Two from Drummond St to Gertrude St later this year are his focus, he says. Circa’s head chef Matt Wilkinson steps into McConnell’s clogs pending a refurbishment early next year. Dining will be moved into the restaurant’s current courtyard and the bar will be extended.

Cafe to watch
Hidden away in Crossley St, Von Haus is the latest cafe with an 11pm licence to be mistaken for a bar. Rupert Duffy, who has run the city bar Misty and worked in Mario’s on Brunswick St, says he is modelling the 30-seat licensed cafe on Gerald’s Bar in Carlton North. The first four whites and first four reds opened by request will become that day’s wines by the glass. In the kitchen is artist and cook Jess Hutchison, who is executing a minimalist menu that will change every few hours, featuring simple soups, pies and, later in the day, small plates.

Fishy business
Wildfish at Port Albert in Gippsland, which opened last week, is about serving fish as fresh as you can get it. Owner Michael Hobson, who’s worked on super yachts for The Big Yin (Billy Connolly) and Richard Branson, says: “It’s straight from the trawler to the plate with the minimum number of steps in between.” Andrew Blake consulted on the menu executed by chef Paul Fitzsimmons. Bookings essential.

Back to BYO
Petrol’s up, food’s up and the cost of eating out is up. The good news is that the cost of drinking wine out has just come down in Carlton where Esposito at Toofey’s will allow you to BYO for $10 a bottle. A sign of the new economic order?

Lamb pie @ Melbourne Wine Room, St Kilda
There’s nothing quite like slipping out of a cold misty night into a warm pie. At The Melbourne Wine Room, a buttery puff pastry lid is tightly wrapped around the edges of the pie dish. Liberated, it soaks up the gravy from the tender lamb, artichoke and pea filling. And at $25, the plate of the day (il piatto del giorno) comes with a decent glass of red. It’s back on Saturday for
the bangers and mash with a sauce carbonade.

MARKETING fads come and go but YouTube and the internet look as if they are here to stay. YouTube is about rich interesting content rather than rich video production companies that usually make expensive TV ads. And this makes it an ideal medium for the small to medium-sized business, according to Sydney-based Laurel Papworth, a social media consultant and evangelist.

“One of the things I like about small business is that they don’t do traditional marketing with high-end effects that are fluff,” she says. “They do an instructional video. I love that because you learn something while you are watching it and I think that’s an important move in advertising. We are looking for some depth of content to our advertising now.”

She says that, for instance, if she was making a hand cream she would blog about it and make instructional videos. “How you use the cream, how I made the cream — and the people who would be interested and passionate about them would be a very small market sector but it’s my social network, my business network and my industry network,” she says.

The most famous of all YouTube marketers comes from the US, Blendtec. Company founder and presenter Tom Dickson has appeared in 70 of his own short, cheaply shot spots where he has demonstrated exactly how robust his blender is, with everything from marbles to an iPhone and a Nintendo Wii remote. “His blender is now the No1 recalled blender,” Papworth says.

Australia is behind the US in using Web 2.0 applications. But small companies are warming to cheaply made YouTube clips, including Bokashi Composting Australia, which uses them to explain how its system works. Sydney-based chef Benjamin Christie uses YouTube and has helped his marketing of Australian indigenous ingredients to the US, in addition to his own brand as a consultant chef.

Scott Garnett, managing director of Sydney-based Barons Brewing, says video helped his entry to the US by training distributors about the business’s beer in an entertaining way. “The reaction in the US was absolutely phenomenal,” he says. “They are absolutely bored out of their minds with the things they have to watch. We get thunderous applause. It was gold.”

After a recent two-month sales trip to the US, he realised the video was causing a lot of interest. He simply uploaded it to YouTube.

“The amount of attention it’s got is staggering. Since we’ve put it on (YouTube) and linked it through the site, the amount of hits we have had is incredible. Some months we’ll get close to 1 million hits on our site and the lion’s share are related to that video.”

Scooteria, which sells scooters from branches in Stanmore and Kensington in Sydney, decided to use YouTube as a service to existing customers. Its YouTube video covers a scooter ride to Royal National Park south of Sydney.

Joint owner Wensley Carroll says that YouTube is one of the most cost-effective ways to host and distribute video on the internet. “We post that actual video on our site as well as on YouTube,” he says. “We’ve just done one at the moment. The aim is to put maybe one out there a quarter. You don’t want to be putting too much on their either because it gets too noisy. People are probably looking for something in particular when they end up on our YouTube page. They will have punched in Vespa or scooter rides in Sydney or something like that. There is a fine line in it being seen as advertising or a community post.”

There are limits to using YouTube. For instance, any single video uploaded has to be under 100MB which, depending on quality, limits length to five to 10 minutes. However, an uploader can raise that to 1GB of content.

As with other social media sites, it does allows users to connect. But for real effect the video user needs to use other social sites and email to help spread the message. Papworth says it should be spread through the communities where the business has social and business connections. These could include a traditional website, blog, Facebook, MySpace or forums. “You wouldn’t create a video and put it up on your Facebook page and just hope to be discovered,” she says. The Facebook viral tools such as Superwall help the user get the message out.

AS was first the case with computers and mobile phones, it’s difficult to know where in the technology cycle to dive into global positioning systems.

GPS has only become popular in Australia in the past two years, with the sales value of GPS devices now overstepping digital music players.

There are about 1.5 million GPS devices in Australia. About 600,000 were sold in 2007, and over 1 million will be sold this year, says Adrian Tout, national sales manager at Sensis, one of the main GPS mapping providers.

Tout says that in the next two years GPS will become a lot more useful for business, with the introduction of SIM cards as well as interactivity through direct connections to the web.

Current GPS systems contain about 500,000 points of interest, with basic data including phone numbers, which can be dialled if a GPS device has a Bluetooth connection to a mobile phone. The plan is to enrich that data and include web surfing and access, for instance, to reviews of hotels and restaurants.

GPS devices already provide traffic data for Melbourne and by the end of the year this will be available for Sydney and Brisbane.

“The trick with this category is the content and as I’m talking to you today it is largely static. It’s not live,” Tout says. “Within the next 24 months you are going to see more dynamic content.

“We are going to have these devices carry SIM cards or right now they Bluetooth to your phone.”

Four GPS brands — Garmin, Mio, Navman and Tomtom — command 85 per cent of the market. They’ve come a long way from early GPS devices, which were over-engineered and hard to use.

The user interfaces have now been dumbed down, with large simple buttons that can be used easily in the car (although the best ones won’t work while on the move).

While mobile phones and PDAs (personal digital assistants) also now offer GPS, their screens and buttons are too fiddly for in the car.

Meanwhile, GPS devices are taking on phone features, at least linking them with Bluetooth, with some featuring 2-megapixel digital cameras that can take geolocated photos.

In fact, MIO (a sister company to NavMan) sells map-enabled phones and PDAs in addition to GPSs.

Both Navman and MIO GPSs can take pictures which can be used as navigation points, a feature useful for real estate agents and tradesmen.

Through their desktop applications, geolocated photos can be downloaded from the Flickr social networking photo site. Once on the GPS device, a user just has to press the photo and it will navigate to that point.

MIO marketing manager Daniel Antonello says that for business users the content now available on GPS devices is useful: “People can have their contacts on a GPS similar to a diary system on there.”

Perhaps most useful is the MIO C720T. Its digital camera acts as a business card scanner with text recognition and it can synchronise with contacts in Microsoft Outlook (but not for Macs).

Tomtom and Garmin (as well as GPS devices in BMW and Mercedes cars) allow the user to download the geotag data from Google Maps through its PC interface. Tomtom has also taken the first steps in interactivity with Mapshare. It allows users to update map data and share it with other members of the Tomtom community. For businesses it will allow them to share new locations — shops, for instance — with the Mapshare community before Sensis updates it records.

Tomtom is also working on bringing its “Add to TomTom” feature from Europe, where it is used by tourism organisations, to Australia.

It allows a business to create a data set of its locations, which can be shared among employees or even published on a website. The message is, if you are not sure that you are ready for GPS, it is best to wait. As with computer and mobile phones, the next generation will be better and cheaper.

MIO C720T

$549

The neatest feature of this all-singing, all-dancing device is that the digital camera can scan business cards directly into contacts, which synchronise with Microsoft Outlook. It can also play MP3s and videos. And it will navigate to “geo-located” pictures taken with its digital camera or downloaded from the Flickr photo-sharing site.

NavMan S90i

$599

At the top of the Navman range, the S90i allows the user to navigate to geo-coded pictures either taken with the inbuilt digital camera or downloaded from the Flickr photo-sharing site. Features of the desktop manager include mileage reporting.

Tomtom Go 720

$599

The top of the range Tomtom GPS allows users to download data from Google Maps. Data can be added and shared with the Tomtom community, and groups of buddies can be created, showing when they are nearby. The main difference between this device and the MIO and Navman products is that it doesn’t have a digital camera.

Home cooks are spoiled for choice when it comes to equipping their kitchens. ED CHARLES looks at the essentials, and the tools we love to use

WE’VE come a long way from cooking in a bush oven over an open fire. The question is whether all our progress has been positive, with kitchen fads changing as frequently as hemlines.
Glossy food magazines and products endorsed by celebrity chefs drive our desire to clutter our kitchens.
Our grandparents survived without Gordon Ramsay’s Royal Doulton pans, preferring solid but sometimes luridly coloured aluminium ones.
Personally, over a Jamie Oliver Flavour Shaker I choose a clean jam jar, but somehow voluptuous Nigella Lawson’s measuring spoons found their way into my top drawer.
What we all need is somebody to take control and tell us to stop accumulating stuff we don’t really need.
That person is Michael Ruhlman, an opinionated American writer who co-wrote The French Laundry Cookbook with renowned chef Thomas Keller.
Ruhlman’s food snob’s account of kitchen basics, The Elements of Cooking (Black Inc, rrp $34.95), was recently released in Australia.
He has a strict rule: anything that has only one use doesn’t have a place in the kitchen.
These tools, he says, include shrimp deveiners, cherry pitters, hand-crank fruit peelers, and special butter, egg, avocado and mango slicers.
Aside from a stove, fridge, countertop and sink, he maintains that a kitchen needs no more than a chef’s knife, a large chopping board, a large saute pan, a flat-edged wood spoon and a large, non-reactive - ideally Pyrex - bowl. Could you live with that?
Ruhlman’s ideas irritate many home cooks whose diverse ethnic culinary traditions require special tools.
Melbourne man Neil Murray, for one, has a Polish background and each year he follows tradition by making cherry vodka.
“Ruhlman is plain wrong about cherry pitters,” he says.
“Ours gets a good workout every year and we’d be lost without it. I’d like to see him de-pip 10kg of cherries without one.
“How does he rice potatoes? Does he never eat spaetzle? What, no grater or mandolin? Just because a tool isn’t used every day, it isn’t useless,” Murray says.
Ruhlman concedes that a good kitchen does indeed need other gadgets.
He has many, including a dedicated tin to make popovers, which are a sort of superannuated Yorkshire pudding. That’s to say nothing of his levain for breadmaking.
He reckons a well-outfitted kitchen is defined by its efficiency and by the quality of those tools that make it efficient. His advice is that pans and knives should be bought individually for their usefulness. Cheap sets or ones sporting the grinning mug of a celebrity chef should be avoided.
For knives, the basics are a good-quality, high-carbon, stainless-steel chef’s knife, 3cm wide and 20-30cm long, and a small paring knife.
“All other knives are non-essentials,” he says.
Serrated knives are banned for cutting anything other than bread because they damage the flesh of fruit and vegetables.
Essential pots include a six to eight-litre, heavy-gauge pan and small one that holds 1.5 to two litres. But controversially, he recommends high-maintenance, cast-iron frying pans over non-stick.
Local chefs Raymond Capaldi and Robin Wickens differ, and reckon that non-stick is practical to be used as a default.
“I think it is better if it’s non-stick,” Capaldi says.
That is, he explains, because it will brown food while any residues easily can be scraped off the low-maintenance surface.
But Ella Hall (above right), a working mum with seven mouths to feed, swears by her cast-iron pots.
“I use a lot of cast-iron ware and I treat it really reverently. It’s all really well seasoned,” she says.
Ruhlman also concedes that he loves his wok.
“You can cook anything in a wok. It’s a great shape,” he says.
“I would only say that if you get one, get a real one, not a non-stick one, not one with a flat bottom.”

The minimalist
ALISON Bell cooks for her two kids every night.
“They are just very basic, quite quick, but nutritious meals. They always have to have fresh veg.
They also have a starch such as rice or potato.”
All Alison needs is her wooden chopping block, a small serrated knife and a microwave in which she cooks rice while her husband cooks the meat on the barbecue.
“I’m really, really minimalist,” she says.
“We have this very simple kitchen and this very elaborate barbecue out the back.”
Bell never really cooked until she moved to Clermont-Ferrand in France for six years and became a mum.
“I have lots of things for my kitchen that I bought in France,” she says.
But her kitchen clutter amounts only to a few skillets, pots and pans, a knife block, a rotary grater,
a wooden handheld lemon squeezer and a set of metre-high clear salt and pepper grinders - in addition to one wooden grinder of a more rational size.
“At the moment it is very simple,” she says.
“I have very plain cups and saucers. I have quite a lot of bowls for cooking and baking and stuff.”

The comprehensive kitchen
SANDRA Rubinstein’s kitchen cupboards are jam-packed with gadgets, including shrimp deveiners, cherry pitters, hand-cranked fruit peelers and special egg and avocado slicers.
“I have no room for anything more. Not even a marble,” Sandra says.
A prolific cook and entertainer, her kitchen is equipped with two Magimixes, two blenders and a plain Mixmaster. Sieves, tongs and other implements hang off the kitchen bench.
Meanwhile, slowcookers, electric frying pans and two electric grills gather dust on top of her cupboards.
Rubinstein describes her pantry (below) as her treasure. It is piled high with pots and pans, including a tall thin asparagus pan, a special oval frying pan for fish and a giant one for cooking paella. But she is quite clear on what she likes and uses most.
“My favourite thing?” she asks.
“That’s the fish scaler that came from a market in Malaysia.”
It looks like a wooden hairbrush, studded with sharp nails.
“It just works so well it is unbelievable,” she says.
A brush made of a special material which skims fat off soups and casseroles is also invaluable, she says.
And she couldn’t do without a tomato corer or a green plastic slicer designed to slice beans into three.
But there is just one item Rubinstein is without: “I’m waiting for my birthday to get that Thermomix,” she says.

The eclectic kitchen
YOU won’t find Jamie Oliver pans in Ella Hall’s kitchen.
“Or the latest gadget that everybody has to have,” she says.
“I don’t own a strawberry huller. I don’t own a prawn deveiner. The most useless thing in my kitchen would be the world’s smallest whisk. It’s the size of a pen. And I have no idea why I have it or what you would actually use it for.”
Ella has seven mouths to feed, so cooking is a practical affair.
She can’t live without her 6.5-litre stockpot for stews and curries.
“It even travels with me down to the holiday house,” she says.
The clasp is now broken on the Breville Toastermatic she bought five years ago for $2.
But with the help of a heavy pan to weigh it down, it still works to feed hungry children and friends in between sports on a Sunday.
She has a handheld blender or “whizzy dizzy” and a loved but unused K-Tel electric frying pan.
“I have to say I’ve never used it,” she says.
“I tend to collect kind of funky and quirky antique cooking things.”
Most treasured of all is a 100-year-old marble slab passed down from her great-grandma.
“My mother cooked pastry on it. My grandmother cooked pastry on it. My mother has memories of her grandmother cooking pastry on it. It is one of those girly family things that gets passed on.”
Hall bemoans the quality of modern gadgets.
“The big bane of my existence is that you just can’t get a decent can-opener any more.”

THE PROFESSIONALS
Chefs have a wealth of equipment at hand at work, but what do they use at home?

Robin Wickens
Interlude, Fitzroy
Wickens doesn’t have many have many gadgets at home.
He survived for years with Ikea pans, but now has a top-quality set.
“I think the best investment you can have is buying a couple of good pots and pans and a good non-stick frying pan. The non-stick pan probably gets used more than any other.”

Patrizia Simone
Simone’s Restaurant
Electric gadgets don’t rate highly for Patrizia Simone.
The item she can’t do without is a wooden chopping board on which she mixes and stretches pasta dough.
“I love my board,” she says. “I prefer it to anything.”
Her other essential is a chitarra or pasta guitar, a frame strung with wire that is used to cut fresh pasta into strands.

Raymond Capaldi
Chef and restauranteur
Known for molecular gastronomy, Raymond Capaldi uses his Thermomix, a device that is part food processor and part cooker, the most.
“The Thermomix is never off because it makes soup quick. You just put all your ingredients in there with some butter and stock. You switch it on at a certain temperature for 10 minutes and you have a soup already made.”

Shanaka Fernando
Lentil as Anything
The most loved item in Shanaka Fernando’s home kitchen is his wok.
The founder of the Lentil as Anything group bought it from a Vietnamese shop in Victoria St, Richmond, with a bamboo steamer.
“I cook my pastas, my curries, everything in it,” he says.

Zoe Roy
The Commoner, Fitzroy
Zoe Roy counts her pestle and mortar bought on Victoria St as her most useful home kitchen item over and above a food mixer.
“The problem with a food mixer is that it is a pain to clean,” she says. “A mortar and pestle, you just wipe out.”
She also loves her electric spice grinder, microplane grater and tongs.
“I think everyone has lots of fun little gadgets,” she says.
“But when it comes down to it, tongs get you a long way.”
Caption: ALISON BELL, SANDRA RUBINSTEIN, ELLA HALL.
A wok, electric appliances, saucepans and dishes, cooking utensils.
Robin Wickens, Patrizia Simone, Raymond Capaldi, Shanaka Fernando.

There’s a new generation of discerning drinkers, writes ED CHARLES
ANDY Roche had never bothered with red wine until last year.
The 26-year-old fashion designer had found his niche with white wines, specifically semillons or sauvignon blanc semillons, his favourite being Evans & Tate.
But last winter became an odyssey as he discovered the range of flavours of pinot noir and occasionally, the boisterous shiraz grape.
“I hadn’t really had it before,” he says.
That was until he attended V-Know, Melbourne wine and networking events for 25 to 35-year-old professionals.
“I decided lighter styles of red wine like pinot were the ones I liked. Since then I have been enjoying it with dinners and out after work and at home,” Roche says.
“It’s also given me an interest into going to wineries and seeing the process of making wines.”
V-Know is the brainchild of marketing consultant Rory Kent, 28, who started the events because he was passionate about wine, but frustrated by friends knocking back the good stuff in restaurants through ignorance.
About 300 people have paid $100 to attend V-Know events such as the Young Gun of Wine Awards and Wine, Women & Song (celebrating women and opera) held at the BMW Edge. Experts are mixed into the crowd to offer helpful advice.
“It’s about making wine cool,” Kent says.
Typical of Kent’s approach is Wine by Design on Thursday. It will raise $25,000 for Make Poverty History by auctioning wines with one-off labels designed by artists, designers and fashionistas.
Fashion designers Akira Isogawa and Alannah Hill, artists Joost Bakker and Ben Frost are creating labels, as is wunderkind chef George Calombaris.
Kent isn’t the only one finding a new generation of wine lovers. Students at wine courses are getting younger, too.
William Angliss’s Leigh Baker sees Roche’s journey from white to red as typical for many wine drinkers.
“It’s a typical cycle of the educated palate,” he says.
“You come in really sweet. You go a little bit drier and then you go really dry. It’s very unusual for people to go straight into reds.”
Now Australian winemakers such as Jacob’s Creek, who have a history of producing big knockabout reds and oaky whites, are making easier drinking wines, European in style, partly to attract new drinkers.
Foster’s, which is as big in wine as it is in beer, has found that the new generation of drinkers will pay up to $25 for the right bottle. Typical of these wines are locally made rosé, pinot gris and sangiovese.
Moscato, a low-alcohol, slightly sweet, slightly sparkling traditionally Italian wine, became a hit during summer.
Innocent Bystander in the Yarra Valley wasn’t the first winery in Australia to make Moscato, but it was the first to feel the full force of the Matt Skinner - Jamie Oliver’s wine guy in London - effect.
In 2006, Fifteen London ordered the last 100 of 700 cases of Innocent Bystander’s 5.5 per cent blushing pink Moscato, which costs about $12.50 for a 375ml bottle.
Word got out and the 5000 cases made in 2007 quickly sold out and every winemaker seemingly had their own version (moscato is quick to make).
Just before Easter the winery released 15,000 cases of the wine for 2008.
As The Prince Winestore’s Alex Wilcox says about Skinner: “What he (Oliver) did to food, Matt did to wine.”
These types of wines are appearing across Melbourne’s most fashionable wine lists in cool bars and restaurants.
They feature prominently on the wine list at Brunswick St’s latest cool restaurant and wine shop, St Jude’s Cellars, an offshoot of the fashionable Panama Dining Room.
The wine list was devised by Jane Thornton, one of a new generation of unstuffy wine buyers.
For a soft spicy vibe, the tempranillo graciano grape was chosen for Kid You Not, a $22 wine aimed at people like its makers, six children of the Brown Brothers winemaking tribe.
Caroline Brown, at 23 the second youngest of the Brown children, says the wines were about being enjoyed with food.
“We wanted to really focus on the concept of getting together and having a good time, rather than talking about the snobby wine hoo hah that some people like to talk about, but not many people really care about.”
Over at Foster’s, a barrel full of marketers are sizing up wine drinkers young and old.
General manager for wine Simon Marton is talking up European styles aimed at people starting out in life rather than nearing retirement.
He wants to sell wine to the people who drank Barcardi Breezers and Smirnoff Ice in the 1990s and is doing this with the company’s latest invention, Rosemount O.
This is a low-carb, low-alcohol wine seemingly inspired by Moscato.
It doesn’t have the fizz of the Champagne-style bubbles in Yellowglen and is designed specifically to taste better in a tall glass with ice.
“I think the key has been for these consumers that the physical taste of chardonnay or red wine, shiraz in particular, is quite a change to what they have been drinking,” Marton says.
“The opportunity was to create a bridge to get those people into wine. They wanted to get into a more sophisticated premium drink and wine does the job.
“But it needs to be of a taste that allows them to get into it.”
Caption: Wine wise: Andy Roche and Rory Kent toast to reds.

Service is one of those funny things. Some companies care a lot about it and others don’t. But as far as the customer is concerned it can make or break a relationship.

Nowhere is there a more concentrated microcosm of the good and the bad of customer service than the restaurant. You almost certainly have been exposed to it yourself. And you may have seen it on reality TV in Gordon Ramsay’s top rating Kitchen Nightmares.

As with all good television, when things go wrong they go very wrong. But if the waiter handles a problem well the experience can be turned around. And the business may have won a loyal customer.

Some restaurants know how to do it well. The Flower Drum in Melbourne under restaurateur Gilbert Lau made its reputation by combining excellent service with beautiful food. At one point New York Times restaurant critic Patricia Wells rated it as the best Chinese restaurant in the world. Part of the secret was the warm greeting every diner received and that it had one member of staff on the floor for every three diners. Now many restaurants have caught up with its professionalism.

Nobody knows this better than Michelle Garnaut, the restaurateur who launched M on the Fringe in Hong Kong in 1989 and M on the Bund in Shanghai in 1999. She hopes to have the 400-seater Capital M in Beijing open for the 2008 Olympics, building works around her permitting.

‘There is a culture of places where people like serving people. And there are other places where people don’t like serving others,’ she says.

When she launched M at the Fringe in Hong Kong 20 years ago there was good service in the big hotels such as the Mandarin Oriental. But it was erratic and tended to involve lots of staff who kept interrupting the meal.

‘If you went to a fancy restaurant you had seven waiters hovering around your table,’ she says. ‘Whether they were able to give discerning service is another question. I think there is a difference between quantity and quality of service.

‘Too much service in my opinion is practically worse than none. You don’t have any opportunity to enjoy the company of the people who you are with.’

Back in The Flower Drum’s precinct at the top end of Bourke and Little Bourke streets in Melbourne the business is as competitive as it gets. There are cult restaurants such as Grossi Florentino and Becco and others that serve equally good food but just have to try a little bit harder.

One of these is Oyster Little Bourke, which recently celebrated its second birthday and was rated with one chef’s hat by The Age Good Food Guide. Luke Stringer, who has managed Ezard and Circa in Melbourne and helped on the launch of Opia in Hong Kong, knows only too well what it takes. Oyster Little Bourke has experienced staff drilled to offer relaxed, friendly but efficient customer service.

‘Business is very competitive and customer service gives you an edge over a competitor,’ says Stringer. ‘How often do you go into the bank and get poor service and swear that you are never going to go back to that bank again? And imagine getting the sort of service in restaurants. Regular custom and a busy restaurant are hard things to come by.

‘Because we don’t have that cult status we want people to keep coming back and looking in and saying this is better than when I came 12 months ago.’

Stringer says that he runs the Oyster Little Bourke team with nine front-of-house staff for 110 to 120 covers (number of people). That would be one person doing the door, two people in the bar, one person running food and five people on sections. Each staff member handles a section of about 20 customers but there is always peripheral staff.

On the same night there would be seven on in the kitchen.

At lunch the staff allocation is tighter, with three people handling 30 guests, as fewer courses and drinks are required.

One of the big changes in the business since Stringer opened is technology. The move from a manual docket system to a point-of-sale system saved toing and froing between front of house and the kitchen. ‘The day we changed over to point-of-sale almost [eliminated] an entire staff member from the service. You physically don’t need to go into the kitchen until the food comes up.’

Some restaurants mistake good service for being servile. It is not about staff getting down on their knees, as Garnaut recently found in Bangkok. ‘I think servile service is awful,’ Garnaut says.

It is explained well in Service Included: Four Star Secrets of an Eavesdropping Waiter by Phoebe Damrosch. The book charts Damrosch’s experience through the launch of Per Se in New York, an outpost of one of the world’s top chefs, Thomas Keller, who is famous for the French Laundry in California’s Napa Valley.

Part of the Per Se formula borders on the ridiculous, with about a dozen different salts being offered. This is because the restaurant recognises that service means that it must anticipate diners’ every need. And the more diners pay for a meal the more ‘pandering to their whims’ they expect.

It is for these reasons that many of the best restaurants have rules, some of which sound draconian but make good sense. At Per Se nothing scented can be worn during service, and open-toe shoes are not permitted. Hair must be cut above the ears and everyone’s hair, including facial hair, must remain as it was when they were hired.

The reasons make sense. ‘Good service — you don’t even know its there,’ says Garnaut. ‘It’s about anticipation. It’s not about the waiter. It’s not about the person servicing you.’

Booking a restaurant table is a contract for service. What a diner expects in a fine dining restaurant is very different from the medium or bottom end of the scale. ‘If you go to McDonald’s, service is not part of the deal. You can expect that the people serving you when you are in a queue are polite and efficient. That is as much as you can expect,’ says Garnaut.

Inevitably things do go wrong when hundreds of diners are passing through a restaurant in a short space of time. What makes the difference is how a complaint is handled.

Robert Khaw CPA, who runs the Isthmus of Kra in Kuala Lumpur, says that common problems include taking the wrong orders, speed of service, not knowing how to deal with customers’ complaints and lack of attention. And the most common problem of them all ‘is the consistency of service’, he says.

‘In Malaysia, staff turnover is very high due to a tight labour market in the service industry. Even with regular training, staff movement creates a lot of inconsistency in the restaurant service.’

Problems include inexperienced staff not being able to explain the menus or wine lists. And, says Khaw, by the time the staff are trained they leave for a better paying job.

‘Something can go wrong somewhere,’ says Garnaut. ‘You can have a problem about food or service and it is all about how you handle it. If it’s handled well you leave a good impression.’

Part of her group’s policy is that mistakes are not paid for by diners. But any recompense has to be in proportion to a problem. ‘Offering people a free cup of coffee is a complete waste of time,’ she says.
Business lessons from the restaurant floor

Good service means understanding needs
Good service doesn’t mean lots of people. Sometimes lots of people can get in the way of good service. It means anticipating a customer’s every need before they know they need it. ‘Good service is about understanding the other person’s needs and putting your own in the background. Your needs are secondary, because this is your job.’

Michelle Garnaut, M Restaurant Group, Shanghai

Establish who is boss
Somebody has to be in charge, oversee the operation and ensure that everything is running smoothly. If there is a problem there should be one person who can immediately deal with it and solve it. A bad customer service experience can be turned into a good one if handled correctly.

Staff capacity can vary
Understand the capacity of each staff member and allocate more experienced, capable and confident staff to busier areas, says M restaurant’s Michelle Garnaut. Younger staff may not be totally confident and should work with more experienced staff. At Per Se in New York there is a pecking order where staff start by clearing tables and moving up to full service once they have the experience.

Proper training equals proper service
‘It is very important to provide proper training and close supervision for good service. Service standards have to be established and monitored. We normally have senior waiters taking the orders and junior waiters running the food and cleaning up. The manager, on the other hand, has to look at the overall operation including the flow from the kitchen to front of house.’

Robert Khaw CPA, Isthmus of Kra, KL

Keeping staff keeps customers coming back
‘The greatest adage I’ve ever heard is that if you can’t keep your staff, you can’t keep your customers. If you’ve got regular customers coming in being served by familiar faces who know where they sit and what they like and those sorts of things, it’s so easy for those people to keep coming back again and again and again.’

Luke Stringer, Oyster Little Bourke, Melbourne

Understand cultural differences with clients and staff
‘Australians take pride in their work, whereas in Asia people tend not to take waiting jobs as seriously, as they do not get paid very well. Asians in general are shy and not very vocal. You are more likely able to strike up a conversation with an Australian waiter than an Asian waiter. The Asian culture, on the other hand, can be quite interesting and charming. For instance, Thai people are very polite, Malaysians can be very friendly, while people in Hong Kong can be very efficient.’

Robert Khaw CPA, Isthmus of Kra, KL
Further information

* read about the The Waiter Rule
* read about what really goes on beneath that cool waiter exterior on the Waiter Rant website

Reference: May 2008, volume 78:04, p. 26 – 29

FOOD franchises are the fastest-growing franchises. On the league table of fastest growers, six are taking some sort of health angle on food: Sumo Salad, Big Dad’s Pies, Healthy Habits, Noodle Box, Pizza Capers and Crust Gourmet Pizza Bar.

Tim Dixon, CEO of consultant Franchise Works, says the high street is so dense with food outlets that new ones need new angles. With long work hours and healthy eating becoming hot topics, they are obvious platforms for marketing.

“All the new franchises that are coming up are saying they are going to be different because of this health-conscious trend,” he says.

Dixon, who has worked with Urban Burger and Spud Bar, says people also want to be able to customise their food as well as eat healthy food.

For Costa Anastasiadis, founder of Crust Gourmet Pizza Bar, the overwhelming trend is that Australians are becoming fat and need to slim down. “We’ve got 190 million takeaways being eaten on a yearly basis,” he says. “But we haven’t got too many healthier options out there for people.” Like McDonald’s, Crust spent 12 months working on introducing the Heart Foundation Tick for its food.

“When we approached the Heart Foundation they were thrilled because they hadn’t had anyone from the pizza industry who had approached them,” Anastasiadis says. “It was a very costly process but we think it has given us an edge. The response we’ve had from our customers has been tremendous.”

During the same period, Crust went through enormous change. It took itself from being a group with four licensed stores to 13 stores, 11 franchised. Currently, the group has 17 stores and another eight under construction. Five are company-owned. And Crust achieved $11 million in turnover for the 2006-07 financial year, double the previous year.

Pizza Capers in Queensland is ahead in the growth stakes. It is currently split, with 12 corporate and 13 franchised restaurants. It has 16 stores in construction or being fitted out, which should all be open within six months, and is aiming for 24 new restaurants this calendar year. Only two new stores will be corporate.

For both companies, the franchise system has allowed rapid growth.

At Pizza Capers, one attraction of the franchise system was that, in the current tight labour market, it had trouble attracting staff for its corporate stores. “We were very much against being a franchisee,” says Pizza Capers founder Anthony Russo. “We wanted all corporate stores, but the low unemployment rate and the quality of the staff got a bit hard to maintain growth the way we wanted it.”

Russo says that financing and managing the opening of 16 corporate-owned stores in four months also would have been a stretch for the company. “When we decided to do it two years ago, we weren’t thinking that large. We didn’t know where we were going to be.”

It’s about reaching a critical mass to achieve the economies of scale. “It’s been a domino effect with all that marketing,” Russo says.

In January last year, Pizza Crust comprised two company-owned stores, the remainder being licensed. For the next six months, it compiled its franchise operations and product manuals. It was a critical step, as it offered the company protection for its intellectual property, which had been passed to competitors by licensees. Anastasiadis says: “We would not have been able to achieve the growth we have in the past 12 months had it not been for franchising and setting up a good system. It would have been impossible.”

Although Pizza Capers is staying away from the Heart Foundation Tick, it is using health as a strong angle in its marketing. “There is definitely a healthier edge on the faster-growing franchises,” Russo says.

“We just created our own niche I guess. We are not into that mass-produced made-for-price product. And we’ve gone down the healthier line which normally goes hand in hand with being a quality product.”

Like Crust Pizzas, it offers a gluten-free product, although Russo says that offering low-fat and gluten-free products is treading a fine line. “Unfortunately, people can think if you go the too healthy line it makes it seem like it will be tasteless as well.”

THERE are two stories about gold coins, no matter how you look at it.

There are the bullion coins linked to the rocketing gold price. Then there is the price of numismatic or collectable coins, which are not directly linked to the gold price but which are outperforming.

The underlying fact is that when anything goes wrong in the financial system, investors turn to gold and gold coins. There are other investment options, such as gold bars and jewellery, but they are not as attractive as coins, which are one of the easiest ways to enter the gold market.

“Coins have proved to be more flexible and more negotiable,” says Robert Jaggard, owner and CEO of coin dealer Jaggards.

“You don’t pay much more to have a 1oz gold coin than a bar - it’s only a couple of per cent difference in it. And its easier to go and sell a one ounce coin any time than a one ounce bar. Most people you show both items to will take the coin nine times out of 10.”

Jaggard says that back in the 1980s there were some cases of forged gold bars, which he expects may happen again if the commodity’s price keeps surging. “It’s much easier to produce a forge bar. A coin is a little more difficult to do. There was never any cases of forged coins.”

Jewellery isn’t worth the investment, according to Tony Richardson of coin dealer Monetarium, because the mark-up is so large.

“Jewellery, you just pay too much for it. 18-carat jewellery is sold from $70 to $80 a gram while the actual gold value is $24. With jewellery you are paying for the manufacturing. Jewellery is not something you’d buy to invest in gold.”

Richardson says part of the attraction of coins is that people can physically own them.

While there are thousands of gold coins collected worldwide, in Australia the market is for mainly gold sovereigns and half sovereigns.

Locally, sovereigns and half-sovereigns were struck in Sydney between 1855 and 1926, Melbourne between 1872 and 1931 and Perth between 1899 and 1931.

Nowadays the Perth Mint still strikes coins although only a small portion are collectable and sovereigns are only struck on special occasions. Because of the jump in the gold price, sovereigns have gone up in value.

Jaggard says: “Australian sovereigns in uncirculated condition have gone and doubled over the last 12 months. These things were selling for $150 only, say, two years ago, and they are about $350 today.”

He thinks they could easily hit $400 if the gold price keeps increasing at its current rate.

“More and more people are wanting to have some uncirculated sovereigns. If you get them in mint condition, there is a lot of potential. There are no more coins around. They are all out there and more and more people want them. So it is going to force the price up.”

Richardson says that a common gold sovereign, in average condition, for example a 1898 coin, may sell from 10 per cent above the price of gold, currently oscillating towards $US1000 an ounce. “That, of course, is directly affected by the increase in the gold price,” he says.

“But if a rare sovereign is in mint condition, that coin could be three or four times the gold price because the rarity of the coin in that condition dictates the price.” There are three things that influence the value of a coin: its rarity, quality and the demand for it. Coins produced by the Franklin Mint, which no longer markets in Australia, may have been produced in small quantities and to a high quality. But because there is no demand for them among collectors, they are only worth bullion value.

There are 250 Australian sovereigns of different dates and mint marks. Rarer still are the half-sovereigns, of which there are 64 in different dates and mints.

“Out of those 64, 50 of them are all scarce to rare. Whereas in sovereigns out of 250, 150 we call common,” Richardson says.

“If the coins are worn flat, you’ll only get bullion value. But coins that are in quality grades, from extremely fine to uncirculated, they can go from $200 for the most common coins up to $200,000 for the rarest coins.”

The 1855 half-sovereign is the first one made in Australia. “That coin even in virtually worn-out grade is still worth $10,000,” Richardson says. “In uncirculated condition, you are probably looking at $200,000 to $300,000.”

These prices are detailed in the annual Australian Coins and Banknotes, by Greg McDonald. Uncirculated Sydney Mint common date single sovereigns are worth $2000 to $3000. But the cheapest uncirculated Sydney Mint half-sovereign is worth $25,000 and more than $50,000 for rarer dates.

These are the only coins that have “Australia” written on them, which makes them popular among collections. But in 1871, the Royal Mint made the Sydney Mint move back to minting British-style coins. In Europe, the market for ancient classical gold coins is huge. According to Richardson, there is a thriving market for coins struck with the images of the 12 caesars from 50BC to 50AD.

“Julius Caesar gold coins can be extremely rare and expensive,” he says. Ancient English gold coins are also popular, especially for monarchs such as Henry VIII.

But Australian half-sovereigns are worth more than most ancient gold coins. “The age has nothing really to do with it. There are two factors: the rarity and the market,” says Richardson. “Age is a misnomer.”

Rare coins have outperformed gold, which itself in five years has increased in US dollar terms by over 170 per cent to about $US940/oz and in Australian dollar terms, because of the strength of the currency, by about 74 per cent.

Jaggard says half-sovereigns have performed particularly well. An uncirculated 1856 half-sovereign has increased from $28,500 five years ago to $68,000. The 1893 Sydney jubilee proof sovereign in five years has gone from $39,000 to $82,500.

The 1852 Adelaide pound is Australia’s first official gold coin. There are thought to be up to 30,000 of these minted in 1851 after gold was discovered at Mount Alexander in Victoria. There are thought to be less than 30 type 1 Adelaide pounds (which had a small crack in its die) in existence, with the highest quality worth about $350,000. But even the second striking of the coin, of which there now are a few hundred remaining, has performed astonishingly well. “Five years ago an uncirculated (type 2) Adelaide pound had a market value of $28,500,” says Jaggard. “Today it’s $120,000. That’s how it’s gone in five years.”

THERE are many ways to buy gold and unless you want some complicated financial instrument the Perth Mint pretty much offers all of them, despite the fact that it owns very little gold itself.

“We don’t own any gold, or virtually none at all,” says Perth Mint treasurer Nigel Moffatt.

The reason it doesn’t own much gold is that it either borrows at an interest rate of about 15 basis points, holds it on behalf of investors and buys it on the spot market as it sells stock.

Founded in 1899 after the discovery of gold in Coolgardie and Kalgoorlie, Perth Mint is the last surviving of Australia’s three other mints - the other two being Melbourne and Sydney.

It was owned by the British government until July 1, 1970, when ownership transferred to the state government of Western Australia, which guarantees all its products.

And it was in 1986 that it started to mint and market modern gold in addition to silver and platinum coins.

Since then is has made more than 17.6 million coins using nearly 700 tonnes of precious metals.

It minted 162,585 bullion coins and bars weighing 107,400.087 troy ounces (nearly 3.34 tonnes) in the year to February 29, 2008.

During that period, it minted 91,710 collectable coins weighing 12,288.416 troy oz (over 3.82 tonnes). And about 80 per cent of sales go abroad.

Perth’s gold is the purest that can be bought, known as 9999, meaning it is 99 per cent pure.

“It’s absolutely fine gold,” Perth Mint sales and marketing director Ron Currie says.

“The purity and the quality are guaranteed because we are a West Australian government-owned business.”

In contrast, the South African krugerrand is 91.67 per cent pure. The coin still contains 1 troy oz of gold. But it weighs an additional 2.9 grams because of impurities.

Most of the mint’s gold holdings, which are not lent out, are held on behalf of investors. Moffatt says about $1 billion is held this way.

The minimum investment in the Perth Mint Certificate Program (PMCP), which is marketed by approved dealers, is $US10,000 for overseas investors and $5000 for locals, increasing in increments of either $US5000 or $5000.

Only the mint markets the Perth Mint Depositary Services (PMDS), in which investors can buy gold in larger quantities.

For overseas investors, the entry level is $US250,000, and locals, $50,000.

Entry fees for both the PMCP and PMD are 2 per cent of the total value. The exit fees are 1 per cent.

The Perth Mint Gold Quoted Product is a right to buy gold on the Australian Stock Exchange.

It is structured as a call warrant, each one giving the right to acquire 1/100th oz of gold.

Of physical gold, bullion coins are the biggest sellers, available in the popular Australian Kangaroo and Australian Lunar series.

Kangaroo coins are available in eight weights from 1/20 oz up to 1kg. The 1kg, 10oz and 2oz Australian Kangaroo coins are available in an unlimited mintage. But the smaller coins are available in quantities of 100,000 to 350,000.

The Lunar gold bullion series comes in nine sizes, from 1/20th oz up to 10kg.

The 10kg coin has a run limited to 100 and the 1oz is limited to 30,000.

The margin charged depends on the weight of the coin. According to Tony Richardson of coin dealer Monetarium, the cheapest way to buy gold coins is in the 1kg form.

“A kilo coin you can buy between 2 and 3 per cent above the spot price of gold,” he says.

Richardson says that a 10oz coin costs 3-4 per cent above the spot price of gold, about $10,800. A 2oz coin will cost 4-5 per cent above spot.

“The 1oz coin, which is probably the most popular because it is in that price category, you would pay between 5 and 6 per cent above spot,” he says.

Collectable coins are sold at a much higher margin than bullion.

Currie says: “Some people love to collect particular types of coins so they are collectors of that coin and look to the numismatic value. Some people are just trading in the metal and therefore looking to just the metal value.”

Currently the mint is selling a commemorative coin for World Youth Day, with an image of the Pope on it.

“We have got Vatican approval for it and we are the licence holder for World Youth Day,” Currie says.

“A lot of people will buy that because it has a picture of the Pope on it, not so much because of the metal value.”

At $1950, the proof 1oz World Youth Day coin sells for almost twice the spot price of gold and is produced in a limited run of 1000.

Other collectables include the Discover Australia collectable series, a limited release of 1000 for each of the coins, the 1/2oz costing $925.

The Fauna series is a three-year series, with a dolphin motif this year. Mintage for the 1/2oz is 1,000 pieces, 1/10oz 2500 pieces and 1/25th is 25,000.

Currie says: “We are very conscious that investment is a word that is very difficult. You have to be an investment adviser to advise people what to invest in. So we actually don’t do that.

“We tell you its a limited edition and you have to work out the investment potential yourself. Although gold at the moment has done very well.”