From The Australian, Entrepreneur THE hospitality business in Australia is huge. It is jam packed full of small entrepreneurial businesses with over 40,000 restaurants, cafes and caterers alone turning over $15 billion. And they all have one massive problem: finding and retaining the correct staff. And that means it is more important than ever to retain the best. The industry employs 242,000 people but it is short of another 55,000 staff, with the biggest problem being finding chefs, ...More »

From The Australian, Entrepreneur Accountant Ramez Abdulnour has calculated how to make a quid on the morning brew, reports Ed Charles YOU'D think the coffee business was about selecting and suppling the product as in any food and beverage business. But in reality it has more in common with the mobile phone business, where handsets are supplied in exchange for spending lots on phone calls. The difference in the coffee business is that the old school coffee roasters ...More »

From SBS Food For something that is more or less an underwater snail, the humble abalone has done pretty well for itself. Twenty years ago a Chinese grocer would pay a few dollars for a barrow load of the ugly blighters known as ‘Muttonfish’ picked out of Port Phillip Bay. Nowadays this mollusk, or to be more precise Haliotidae, is prized by chefs to the extent that many regions including South Africa, the Middle East and California ...More »

From GQ Australia How does a heritage-listed synagogue become one of Melbourne's hottest new restaurant-bar venues? Ed Charles finds out from Trunk's Nick Kutcher. It was the irresistibly enticing site that drew Nick Kutcher into the restaurant business, a block big enough to build a skyscraper on, half of it open land. But the site on the corner of Little Lonsdale and Exhibition streets - with a heritage listed 1859 synagogue - was bought for its charm ...More »

From The Australian, Entrepreneur THERE are many reasons to start a business. Some people are driven by money. Others by passion. But for Omar Kilani, of Sydney, the Remember The Milk web application came about simply because of a personal need and his passion for programming, which he has followed since he was 13. He wanted to organise himself, and his business partner and fiance Emily Boyd was an enthusiastic user of to-do lists. In 2004, Kilani relished the programming ...More »

From The Australian, Entrepreneur TO some extent, Web 2.0 or the read-write web as it is known, is all about crowd sourcing. The idea is that the crowd can create content for you, give feedback and even have a hand in designing products they really want. It's a tricky concept for many companies to master but the latest generation of crowd-sourced websites such as 99designs and Gooruze are making it safe for businesses to participate. There are many ...More »

Cover Story: Herald Sun extrafood Top chefs tell Ed Charles their secret tips on how to cook like a professional. Cooking a meal by simply following a recipe is one thing,but turning it into a masterpiece by adding a few secret tips and tricks can take your cooking to another level. As extrafood discovered, sometimes it's the most obvious things - such as properly preheating the oven - that can make the biggest difference. We've managed to get some ...More »

From SBS Food Ed Charles takes a tour of Beijing's culinary underbelly and uncovers the seven strangest foods you'll find in the Olympic City. You can encounter some pretty weird food in Beijing. But mostly it is designed for tourists more than the locals. “For westerners going to China for the Olympics, if they want to they can go and eat silk worm cocoons and go and eat penises and snakes,” says author and Chinese food expert ...More »

From SBS Food The hunt is on! Ed Charles joins Victorian truffle farmers as they seek out the heady aromas of this most mysterious funghi. Spice, is two weeks from pup, but the two year old Australian Shepherd, whose pedigree name is Mazasuka Star Struck, wants to do the job she was trained for. That is to sniff out the tuber melanosporum or black Perigord truffle, an exotic fungi that lives symbiotically with the roots of oak ...More »

From SBS Food Deep-fried scorpion, silk worm pupae and wok-fried beetles - all excellent sources of protein. Ed Charles takes a look at Western food taboos and the people who break them. Cows are seen as a civilised food. Insects are not. It is a division that partly accounted for Australia’s first European settlers villifying the indigenous population for their enjoyment of strange foods and grubs. “Food intake was a very important part of situating people as not ...More »