View from the Steyne Hotel. Not bad eh? Enjoy breakfast in Cafe Opera, Level 1. Breakfast is available from 6:30am -10:30am daily. As a hotel breakfast it ain’t bad. Passable (just) scrambled eggs but best of all streaky bacon and decent sausages. A highlight is the honeycomb, yoghurt and fruit. Nice filter coffee. 0845 Meet with your Destination NSW host Lauren Zoneff and make your way on to the Harbour Master Steps for your Manly Fast Ferry. Myself, Kerry […]
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Diary of a food festival: Day one
1540: Flight DJ849 arrives into Sydney Meet your Astra Limousines driver for your transfer to the InterContinental Sydney. Delays! The storms in Melbourne means that I don’t arrive until after 5pm for a drinks party at 6pm. 1800: Meet Destination NSW in the lobby of the hotel for transfer to the Hilton Hotel for the Crave Sydney International Food Festival Official Launch Party I meet David Lebovitz in reception together with Helen from Grab your fork and Chocolate Suze and […]
Doing Better Business 10 October 2011
If you want to find out how social media can help your hospitality business win fans and customers, I’ll speaking at one of the restaurant and catering Doing Better Business Seminars on 10 October at Nobu. I’ll be talking about what modern day consumers expect from a restaurant and their website. In contrast to being a threat social media now provides free market research to businesses helping them give customers what they want. The implication for businesses is that you […]
Q&A: Will you support Bread for Good?
Q: Hope you’re having a great Tuesday. I’m a big fan of your blog and just wanted to get in touch about an upcoming campaign you may be interested in. As part of Good Food Month, The Age and Sydney Morning Herald are encouraging restaurants to help make a difference for children affected by the famine in East Africa through the Bread for Good project. I’ve posted some more details below and you can also find out more at www.breadforgood.com.au. […]
Centre yourselves on your customers
There’s a great quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt in this blog post: “Microsoft organised itself around the structure of the industry; Apple organised itself around the customer. You have to organise around the customer.” I caught up with Chris Lucas who I helped out on the digital and social media side for the launch of Chin Chin. He is excited about what social media offers to focus what he does on the customer. Each day he feeds reviews from […]
Be everywhere with everything
So how does the internet work nowadays? There is no one prescriptive answer but it is more than just having a single website or newsletter that can only be viewed on a computer. It’s all about giving choices. The information on your website need to be available all over the place. That means it should be available to the near 11 million Facebook users in Australia, the 1.8 million or so people on Twitter locally and the 2 million or […]
Check the Vue at Lui Bar
The view alone is worth it at the new Vue de Monde. Photo: Adriane Strampp In case you hadn’t heard,Lui Bar at Shannon Bennett’s new Vue de Monde at the top of The Rialto is open to all comers. And it is not only worth it for the drinks but the vue (view geddit?) of the traffic streaming through Melbourne at night. The attention to detail and the levels of service at Lui Bar are unmatched in Australia. First you […]
Gourmet Traveller vs the people
What crazy things restaurant rankings are, eh? A small group of the same old people pretty much are the judges for all the local restaurant awards, whether it is Gourmet Traveller, which announced its Sydney-centric version this week, or The Age, which is next week. It’s a mad mad mad world when you factor in the user generated rankings from Urbanspoon, with the real winners in the two lists being Frank Camorra and his Movidas and Andrew McConnell with Cutler […]
Cheese is about to get a lot more tasty
Which of the above cheese aren’t you allowed to eat? If they were made from raw milk then none. But if proposals put forward by Food Standards ANZ (FANZ) go through only the hard and semi hard cheeses. And you won’t be able to buy (legally) raw milk altogether. The world is divided as to whether unpasteurized milk products are dangerous or not because all sorts of allegedly nasty bugs live in it. Really though it isn’t necessarily a problem […]