Tag Archives: Belmond Mount nelson Hotel

Cape Town Top 20 World Travel Destination, home to 7 of South Africa’s Top 10 Hotels, according to 2020 Forbes Travel Guide!

February 20, 2020

The Forbes Travel Guide has included ten top South African hotels in its 2020 Star Award winner list, seven of which are in Cape Town, one in Stellenbosch, and two in Johannesburg. Cape Town also made the Guide’s Top 20;Travel Destination List. Continue reading →

Restaurant Review : Magical Mad Hatters High Tea at Beverly Hills Hotel in Umhlanga!

August 23, 2015

The Beverly Hills Hotel Pastry Chef Jodi Gillespie is a very talented creative lady, and has put the pink hotel in Umhlanga on the map as serving the most creative High Tea in KwaZulu-Natal, and even in our country! I was lucky to check into the hotel yesterday afternoon, in time to see the High Tea, and enjoy a taste of it, the most creative High Tea display I have ever seen.

Chef Jodi is from the Durban area, and studied at the Christina Martin Culinary School. From there she moved to Dubai, working at Continue reading →

Why do hotel restaurants not have better patron support and win awards?

March 22, 2015

It was a recent article by Nick Lander, husband of renowned wine critic Jancis Robinson and restaurant critic in the UK, about restaurants in hotels he had visited in Dubai that made me consider once again why hotel restaurants fare so poorly in patron support and in the Eat Out Top 10 restaurant awards in our country.

Lander writes that specific rules about restaurants and liquor licences force restaurants to be linked to hotels in Dubai. In our country no such rules apply, and as a service to guests, hotels have over the years added dining facilities, in early days being the only restaurants offering tea and cake, and lunch and dunner. My parents drove us with overseas visitors to Franschhoek’s Swiss Farm Excelsior (now the Le Franschhoek Hotel), the benchmark of restaurants in those years.

Continue reading →

SAA wine selection scandal, perfect SA bribery and corruption soapie!

January 29, 2015

City Press reported over the weekend that SAA sommelier and Global Food and Beverage Manager, Bongi Sodladla, was feted with bribes and incentives to offer wine purchase contracts to those wineries which greased her palms. Had Bribery Bongi not been going through a divorce, and had her still-current husband Wonga Sodladla not been so generous with information sent to SAA last month about his wife’s misdemeanours, SAA, the wine industry, and the South African public would never have known what was going on behind the scenes of SAA’s wine buying!