It could have been a disaster, changing the venue from the Mistico Equestrian Centre outside Paarl to the SunEvents Centre at GrandWest two days prior to the 17th Eat Out Mercedes-Benz Restaurant Awards 2015 today. It turned out to be the best Friday the 13th disaster for New Media Publishing, organizers of the Eat Out Awards, described by many as the best Eat Out Awards ever! Continue reading →
Tag Archives: cellars Hohenhort
Restaurant Review: Greenhouse restaurant turns over a new leaf, reinvents itself!
After four years at Cellars-Hohenhort, the Greenhouse has completely transformed itself by changing its decor and menu, only the floor remaining the same!
How brave yet exciting it must have been to remove every decor item (including the ceramic bunnies), all the crockery and cutlery, the glassware, the menu covers, the placemats, the waiter uniforms, the tables and chairs, the lamps and lighting, and anything else that had gone before, Continue reading →
Eat Out Top 20 Restaurant shortlist 2015: a prediction! Judges identified too!
The Eat Out judges are doing the rounds in evaluating our country’s Top 20 restaurants, from which they will pick their Top 10 Restaurants for 2015, to be announced at a Gala Lunch at Mistico Equestrian Centre outside
Paarl on 15 November.
Last year a number of restaurants made it to the Top 20 shortlist, possibly by default, as the largest number of chef changes ever took place in 2014, making the restaurants linked to those chefs ineligible to be considered for an Eat Out Top 10 award. This affected Hartford House (Chef Jackie Cameron starting her Jackie Cameron School of Food and Wine), Delaire Graff (Chef Christiaan Campbell Continue reading →
Why do hotel restaurants not have better patron support and win awards?
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.