Tag Archives: Mayor Patricia de Lille

Paulaner Bräuhaus closes down due to dispute with V&A Waterfront!

The Paulaner Bräuhaus closed its doors suddenly last night, after operating for more than ten years in the Clocktower section of the V&A Waterfront.  It was the largest restaurant in Cape Town, this country, and the southern hemisphere, with 1100 seats.  The restaurant and micro-brewery were closed down by its new owners Hospitality Property Fund Limited (HPF) due to an inability to reach consensus with the V&A Waterfront on an acceptable market value rental for the renewal of the five year lease.

The Paulaner Bräuhaus lease runs out at the end of March.  I was told that the rental, currently at about R250000 per month, would increase to double that of the most expensive Johannesburg rentals per square meterage, and would be double the current rental.  No amount of negotiation with the management of the V&A Waterfront could result in a reduced rental.  The owners of HPF decided to not prolong the running of the restaurant until the end of March, and informed the Paulaner management a week ago that the whole restaurant and micro-brewery operation would close down last night.  Staff were told on Wednesday, and customers were informed via Facebook as follows on Friday:

“Dear Paulaner Patrons, Please take note that as a result of our lease at the V&A Waterfront having come to an end, the week of 13 February will be the last week of trading by the Paulaner Bräuhaus. Our doors will be closing indefinitely on Sunday, 19 February 2012 at 22h00. We invite you to make use of this opportunity to visit us for a last taste of our renowned and award-winning beers and popular food menu. It is with great sadness that we, the management and staff of the Paulaner Bräuhaus have to bid you farewell. We would like to thank all our loyal supporters over the years – it has been a pleasure serving you! PROST! Paulaner Bräuhaus Management and Staff”.

I went to Paulaner yesterday afternoon, and given the hot weather and the last date of operation, the restaurant was jam-packed, many coming to pay their last ‘respects’ to a restaurant that was the epitome of Bavarian beer and food.  There was a lovely atmosphere, and there must have been many tears at 22h00 when they closed the Paulaner doors for the last time.  On Twitter one could read how many Twitterers had gone to Paulaner, and how sad they were about the closure.   Mayor Patricia de Lille had come as well, and told a waitress that she was prepared to toi-toi to keep the restaurant open.  Initially a manageress told me that there was no comment about the closure, and that the GM Jan-Karl Schiebe could not speak to me about it either.  He did however come over to me, being very hesitant about sharing any information with me, until he worked out who I am from Twitter.  Then everything changed.

HPF Limited did not entertain a management buy-out, nor extending the closing date by a week at least, so that a Farewell Beer Festival could be held next week, at the request of the Paulaner management.  HPF Limited bought Paulaner Bräuhaus Restaurant and the Micro-Brewery, the Westin Grand at the Convention Centre (now Westin Cape Town), and Arabella Hotel & Spa in Kleinmond last year.   The hotel and leisure property company is involved in 26 properties to the value of R 3,9 billion, says its website, including a number of Protea Hotels, and the Mount Grace Country Hotel.  There is no mention of Paulaner on the HPF website.

Today the Paulaner branding will be removed, the furniture will be removed, the windows will be covered in newspaper, and the interior will be restored to how it was handed over to Paulaner in 2001, when Paulaner started off under the guidance of brewmaster Wolfgang Ködel, who has been involved in the business throughout this period.  Clients of Paulaner beer will fetch what beer is left over today. I spoke to Allée Bleue GM Wolfgang Leyrer yesterday morning about the effect the demise of Paulaner will have on his business, being a stockist, and he was shocked to hear the news, not having received any notification about it.  Given the outpouring of support, both on Facebook and Twitter, and also at the restaurant, one can only hope that the management will obtain a franchise from Paulaner in Munich, to set up a restaurant and a brewery with more reasonable rentals elsewhere in Cape Town.

The closure of the Paulaner Bräuhaus Restaurant and Micro-Brewery is a sad day for Cape Town – it was an attraction for German tourists who know the brand from Munich, where it was established in 1634.  They loved its genuine German beer and food, with Bavarian music to match, and the female staff wearing the traditional Bavarian Dirndl.  It helped the V&A Waterfront to attract visitors to a part of the Waterfront that was an effort to get to, being across the Swing Bridge, and not visible from the shopping centre, and is only visited by those tourists going to Robben Island.  It will leave a gaping hole in an area of the V&A Waterfront that already does not attract locals.

Attempts to receive a comment from the V&A Waterfront company have not been successful to date.

POSTSCRIPT 21/2: The Cape Argus has written about the Paulaner closure today, and quotes from our blogpost.  The journalist Murray Williams was luckier in receiving a comment from the V&A Waterfront: “The V&A Waterfront’s leasing department was advised by HPF in April last year that they would not be exercising their option to renew the lease agreement for the Paulaner Bräuhaus property. The HPF did not negotiate the lease agreement for the Paulaner Bräuhaus. The V&A Waterfront is negotiable on its property rentals”. HPF spokesperson Andrew Rogers tells a different story: “The V&A did not want to consider alternative leasing options and whilst the rentals were unsustainable for any business of this nature based on the historic escalations, the period was always expiring in March 2012.  The closure process has been under way for the past six months, always with the hope that the V&A would reverse their thinking in terms of the lease and operations, and that they would entertain offers for a similar type of operation.  However, it was not the case and it was finally decided to comply with the terms of the lease and vacate the premises”.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage

‘Cruisin’ Cape Town Tourism Councillor Grant Pascoe sunk by Department of Home Affairs!

Increasingly one wonders what exactly Grant Pascoe, City of Cape Town Mayoral Committee Member for Tourism, Events and Marketing, has achieved for Cape Town in respect of Tourism, Events and Marketing since he took on this portfolio last year, with no success recorded to date, and with criticism rather than praise levelled at the Councillor.  Given his increasing twit-twat on Twitter, one wonders what the Councillor does all day!

Last week the Councillor decided to look for some publicity for himself, perhaps given our criticism of him on this blog, and issued a lightweight media release, slamming the Department of Home Affairs for refusing permission for cruise ships to dock in the V&A Waterfront with immediate effect.  He made all the right noises about the detrimental effect this would have on tourism, but did not offer to get involved to make a difference, which he should have done, given his Tourism portfolio!  In the Cape Times he was quoted as follows: “We are obviously uneasy about the possible impact of this ruling on Cape Town’s status and reputation as a cruise tourism destination as well as on tourism revenues to the city. The City notes concerns about security risks underlying the decision. However, we will discuss the ruling with the relevant authorities to find a way to best serve Cape Town’s tourism interests, without compromising the status of the port as a secured area.” There have been no subsequent reports of Councillor Pascoe and/or Cape Town Tourism (CEO Mariette du Toit-Helmbold is on maternity leave until April) meeting with the harbour or immigration authorities, conveniently leaving this to his provincial counterpart Tourism Minister Alan Winde, who has slammed the decision, and has already met with officials.

The Department of Home Affairs’ Director of Immigration: Maritime & Aviation Ports Western Cape, Tariq Mellet, who was responsible for the cruise line berthing directive last week, took exception to Councillor Pascoe’s media statement (surprisingly he has not reacted to Minister Winde’s media comments, as far as we are aware), and slammed Councillor Pascoe in a 3-page detailed document for ‘having a  poor understanding of the issues involved at the Cape Town Harbour’, writing about the cruise ship issue on Politicsweb. Adding insult to injury, Mellet attacks the Councillor in writing: “Perhaps if the City Council took a greater interest in playing a role in Cape Town Harbour, its development and in Passenger Line Tourism he (sic) would understand the issues at play.  He (sic) has even the basic facts wrong”!

Mellet explains at length the complexities of cruise liner berthing in Cape Town, saying that cruise liner berthing in the V&A Waterfront has been an occasional occurrence, mainly because Duncan Dock or Eastern Mole have not been available, as a ‘commercial convenience’.  “Anyone looking at the real facts and bothering to consult the role-players charged with clearing passengers, would have clearly seen that cruise ship tourists are getting a raw deal”, he added!   The Department of Home Affairs has the final say as to which ports are entry points for international tourists, he emphasised. Being welcoming to cruise tourists, yet offering them security is a ‘careful balance’.  Mellet says that cruise tourism could be four times as large as it is currently, if Cape Town offered a more secure and attractive cruise liner berth, a responsibility which Councillor Pascoe should be addressing with urgency.  He states that the berthing directive had been communicated to the port authority in December, but had been ignored.  He slates the uproar about the berthing, writing that the cruise tourists will visit the V&A Waterfront anyway, and that they may visit other areas in Cape Town too, writing about ‘being controlled by a greedy few and some of the scams that arise in the closed environment of the harbour‘.  He writes that Jetty 2 in the Waterfront is only 195 meters long, and therefore cannot berth larger ships.  One of the last paragraphs summarises what the Department of Home Affairs is trying to protect, and one wonders what Mellet refers to, given that his tirade was directed against Councillor Pascoe: “The present furore over Home Affairs ensuring compliance with legislation at Cape Town Harbour seems to have less to do with the V&A Waterfront venue when the facts are scrutinised and more about parties with vested interests wanting to buck the system and wanting a continuation of lax security in an environment where a host of scams and dodgy activities have been thriving for years”!

Councillor Pascoe had egg on his face last year, when he tried to shave his budget by cutting the funding of Design Indaba (after an outcry he quickly reinstated the funding).  He has also been criticised for the loss of the Saracens versus Biarritz Heineken Cup game scheduled for Cape Town, not getting agreement at which of Newlands Stadium and Cape Town Stadium the game would have been played at, due to a conflict between the City of Cape Town (Councillor Pascoe’s portfolio) and the Western Cape Rugby Union, which cost Cape Town the tourism benefit of thousands of supporters who would have travelled here to see the teams play! To try and save face, the Councillor Tweeted some photographs last week of Saracens practicing at Cape Town Stadium, the team already having bought the flight tickets at the time that the Stadium wrangle took place.

We have written extensively how the Councillor rudely refuses to return telephone calls, or to reply to e-mails and Tweets, when we have had some pressing questions for the Councillor about the R40 million budget (from ratepayers’ monies) allocated to Cape Town Tourism for this financial year, of which little meaningful expenditure is visible.  We have also left (unanswered) messages for Deputy Mayor Ian Nielson, who controls the Council finances, and cannot get a response from the City of Cape Town about how it evaluates the efficiency of Cape Town Tourism’s performance and its expenditures, and how it allowed the appointment of an Australian consultant with a not so blemish-free background!

The Councillor seems to have lots of time in his day, when he is not attending the odd Council meeting, having taken to Twitter, Tweeting incessantly, mainly about cricket and general non-Tourism related matters.  He has shown his lack of morals and ethics, and his naivety as far as the law of defamation is concerned, by re-Tweeting defamatory Tweets earlier this week.

One wonders how Mayor Patricia de Lille evaluates the efficiency of her Mayoral Committee and the budget expenditure.  One wonders how the Mayor selected Councillor Pascoe for the Tourism, Events and Marketing portfolio, given that he has no past tourism or marketing experience, having been a DA Councillor for Mitchell’s Plain for ten years, serving on the Mayoral Committee with the Social Development and Special Projects portfolio in 2010, something his incomplete theology studies may have been more suitable for! Yesterday the Councillor appears to have won some political brownie points for having helped the DA win a city by-election with an overwhelming majority.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com twitter: @WhaleCottage

Cape Town World Design Capital 2014 : ‘Live Design, Transform Life’!

It was announced earlier this morning, at the World Design Alliance Congress in Tapei, that Cape Town has won the bid for the title of 4th World Design Capital 2014.  Our congratulations go to the Cape Town Partnership, compilers of the 465-page Bid Book, who are in Taipei as part of a nine-person delegation representing the city.  The year-long accolade, the first for an African city, will see Cape Town hosting a series of design-related events in 2014, and should attract new visitors to Cape Town.

Accepting the honour on behalf of Cape Town, Mayor Patricia de Lille said that a city must be designed for and with its communities.    She pointed out that the year of World Design Capital 2014 co-incides with the 20th anniversary of South Africa’s democracy and freedom for all.  She also said that tourism was bound to benefit, as this had been the experience for other Design Capitals in the past.  The City of Cape Town spokesperson Pierre Cronje said on Kfm that it was a ‘wonderful inspirational award for the city of Cape Town’.

Writing in the Cape Argus yesterday, Cape Town Partnership MD Bulelwa Makalima-Ngewana said that making Finalist stage of the Bid, with Dublin and Bilbao, had already changed Cape Town. She writes that in compiling the Bid Book, she and her team had seen Cape Town ‘as a human system’. In compiling the design wealth of the city, she is confident that the private and public sectors will invest in design ‘as a tool to create the liveable Cape Town we strive for.‘  The Cape Town Partnership strives for every one of its citizens to have a house by 2030, and that economic opportunities are created for all its residents.  Economically, the new Cape Economic Development Partnership, convened by Cape Town Partnership CEO Andrew Boraine, is a ‘design project’ in itself, its goal being to maximise economic growth in the city, which will benefit employment.  She calls for the city’s design portfolio and innovation to be exported into Africa, alongside our wines and fruit.  She called for the creation of a ‘knowledge economy’ in the Cape.  She said that winning the Bid would not be ‘a pat on the back for producing aesthetically pleasing objects or monuments to design. Instead, it recognises and rewards the employment of design as a tool for change’.  She added that design must be used to uplift our society, improve the lives of the locals, and efficiently ‘deliver taps and toilets to societies’, to aid transformation.  Winning the Bid will create focus and set deadlines, she writes.  The Partnership hopes to grow Cape Town ‘into one of integration’, given its past as a ‘city of segregation’.  We have been critical of the premise of the Bid that design caused segregation in Cape Town, and that design must turn this around by creating integration.

Cape Town has more than 800 creative industries, it is estimated, and the Cape Town Partnership calls for an inventory of design industries of three years ago to be repeated.

Six design events will be implemented within one month in 2014, as part of the World Design Capital 2014 requirement.  The World Design Capital is awarded every two years.  The World Design Capital last year was South Korea, and the World Design Capital 2012 is Helsinki.  All three cities agreed, prior to the announcement of the winning city, to collaborate.  See the video which was presented for Cape Town as part of its bid.  The City will pay €160 000 to the International Council for Societies of Industrial Design, for the licencing fee to hold the title, says the City’s media release just received.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage

Cape N1 and N2 toll road plans serious tourism, wine and hospitality industry threat!

The proposed toll roads on the N1 and N2 highways linking Cape Town to the rest of the Western Cape could seriously threaten tourism to the province’s country towns, and with it its wine industry, and could impact on food and wine prices too.  The proposed project is being opposed at the highest level.

The proposed R10 billion toll road plan includes a second Huguenot Tunnel to be completed for the N1 highway, outside Paarl.  A ‘tunnel’ is also to be built, connecting De Beers Avenue and Victoria Road between Somerset West and Strand, to take traffic off the current road through the industrial part of Somerset West, which causes huge traffic blockages at peak tourist traffic times, especially on Friday and Sunday afternoons, despite the recent completion of the widening of this section of the highway.   Toll stations have been proposed on the N1 at the Old Oak interchange (near Kraaifontein) up to the Hex River valley, and on the N2 from Bot River going east for 70 km.  This means that any visitors to the Winelands via the N1 (Franschhoek, Paarl, Wellington, Robertson) will be affected in particular, as will be those travelling to Hermanus, and to the already tourist-deficient Garden Route. Costs to the financially constrained hospitality industry will rise, as farmers and suppliers will have to add the toll costs to their produce.

Resistance to the proposed tunnels, especially to the second Huguenot Tunnel, has come from the national Deputy Transport Minister Jeremy Cronin, reports the Cape Argus. The Deputy Minister questioned the decisions made by the SA National Roads Agency Limited, stating that these should be made at far higher levels. He does not believe that it is a ‘big national, or provincial or Cape Town priority‘.  Cronin suggested that the Cape’s bigger priority is to provide more public transport, and to move more road freight onto transportation by trains.

Last week it was reported that Patricia de Lille, Mayor of Cape Town, had filed an interim interdict against SANRAL’s proposed toll road plans. The City of Cape Town motivated its interdict application as follows: “millions of people and businesses will be adversely affected financially by the proposed tolling, and the City will have to foot the bill for maintaining and upgrading municipal roads to accommodate the traffic that will divert off the national roads if they are tolled”, reports Southern African Tourism Update.  The approval of the N1/N2 Winelands Toll Highway Project by then Minister of Environmental Affairs Marthinus van Schalkwyk has been seen by the City to be flawed, in that the Environmental Impact Assessment did not evaluate the socio-economic effect of the proposed tolling.  The City also believes that tolling is an ‘inefficient and often unfair way of funding road upgrades’. Other bodies that have expressed their opposition to the proposed project include the Cape Regional Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the ANC in Cape Town, COSATU, and Cape Town Routes Unlimited.

The interdict application of the City of Cape Town is due to be heard on 6 December.  Construction work is expected to start in the second quarter of next year, and will take three years, it is planned.

POSTSCRIPT 24/10: The Cape Times reports today that the national Minister of Transport, S’bu Ndebele, has put all planned toll road projects on hold, in order that ‘concerned parties’ be given a chance to express their views. The Minister said that while roads should be of a good standard and thereby assist in meeting economic growth targets, the proposed road developments should not place a heavy burden on ‘consumers’. The City of Cape Town has said that it is continuing its interdict application.  The City says that the implementation of toll roads is ‘fundamentally flawed and illegal’, and that it is ‘unfair discrimination against poor and largely black communities who would be disproportionately affected’.  From a tourism and hospitality industry perspective, the Minister’s action is welcomed.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage