Last week I found a reference to my name in a review written about author Irna van Zyl’s second book, called ‘Death Cup: Murder is on the menu’, a play on words with a mushroom by the same name, naming me as the model for one of the main characters in the book, as the writer of the ‘infamous food blog’. As I had been told this verbally on another occasion too, I had to go to Exclusive Books to buy a copy of the book. There is no mistaking the blog of the ‘food blogger’ as being my WhaleTales Blog! Continue reading →
Tag Archives: Sam Woulidge
Restaurant critics: what do we look for when evaluating a restaurant?
I am honoured that talented brother and sister team Mari-Louis Guy (judge of Koekedoor and the forthcoming Kokkedoortjie) and Callie Maritz of Cakebread included me in their shoot for visi magazine to demonstrate the new trend of decorating cakes with flowers. I had no idea that the photographs of the six food writers Errieda du Toit, Mari-Louis Guy, Zola Nene, Samantha Woulidge, Ishay Govender-Ypma, and I would be featured in the latest issue of visi lifestyle and decor magazine. To crown it all, an interview I did with Callie and Mari-Louis about restaurant reviewing and my favorite restaurants has just been featured on the Cakebread website.
Woolworths under consumer pressure, on the back-foot, in massive Sunday Times supplement?!
We wrote recently how Woolworths has been misleading consumers with claims about its Ayrshire milk, deceiving food labelling, and how it tries to create an image of healthy produce via its ‘Hayden Quinn: South Africa‘ series on SABC3. The group Grass Consumer Food Action has been persistent in its criticism of Woolworths, and appears to have hit a raw nerve in the Good Business Journey division at Woolworths, the retailer having launched a brand new ‘Good Food News‘ 16-page insert in the Sunday Times yesterday! It looks like a Taste magazine (the Woolworths sponsored magazine published by New Media Publishing) but printed in Tabloid format on recycled paper!
While the Tabloid has ‘headlines’ on page 1, to attract one’s attention to the content, it consists of a mix of ‘advertorials’ of its award-winning wines (since when are wines a food, as per the name of the publication?) in ‘Crowned as the best‘; ‘responsibly sourced‘ fish; braai suggestions for ‘Ready Steady Braai’; and ‘Flavours of Home‘ (prepared
foods with strong spices such as curries, and traditional foods such as koeksisters and milk tart); as well as editorial. It is obviously planned as a monthly insert, numbered ‘Issue 01′, and dated September 2014. The focus of the first issue is ‘lovelocal‘:
* ‘New on the shelf‘ (page 3) showcases new pack designs for wine boxes, braai tins, braai marinade, braai Continue reading →
Eat Out selects Top 500 restaurants for its 2014 Guide!
One of the changes New Media Publishing has introduced for Eat Out‘s 2014 edition is that its printed Restaurant Guide will only list 500 restaurants, as opposed to 1100 last year. The method of selecting the included restaurants has changed too.
The process commenced with Eat Out announcing that it was looking for applications from restaurants to be included in the 2014 Eat Out Guide, such applications closing on 30 June. It described the application process as follows: ‘This call to action turns up the heat and shifts the onus onto the restaurant to put themselves forward in a simple process‘. The restaurants that wanted to be considered for inclusion had to complete a Continue reading →