Condé Nast Traveler has ranked Cape Town as the third Best Food City in the World in its Readers’ Choice Awards 2014. It follows hot on the heels of Spanish San Sebastián and Paris, and beat Florence, Rome, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Barcelona, Quebec, Sydney, Vancouver, Montreal, Lyon, Bologna, Kyoto, Vienna, Budapest, Madrid, and Melbourne.
Cape Town was lauded as a food destination as follows: Continue reading →
Cape Town has done it again, being named Best City in the World in the Telegraph Travel Awards 2014 by its readers for the third year in a row! Vancouver and Venice follow in second and third position, respectively, this year. The motivation for Cape Town’s top position is written by Pippa du Bruyn, who is a Cape Town-based local travel writer and ‘destination expert’, including author of a ‘Frommer’s Guide’ to South Africa, and of ‘A Hedonist’s Guide to Cape Town’. De Bruyn surprisingly exaggerates our restaurants as ‘Michelin-rated‘ fare, and in describing Dyer Island near Gansbaai as being in Cape Town. Her laudation for Cape Town follows: Continue reading →
From having been low key for eight years since opening, 2014 has been kind to Kyoto Garden Sushi, in it winning a 5* Smart Casual accolade in the 2015 Diners Club Rossouw’s Restaurant Guide, as well as Best Asian Restaurant in the 2015 Mercedes-Benz Eat Out Awards last month. As a result friend Whitney Wentzel and I had extremely high expectations when we had dinner there last Wednesday evening, which sadly were not met at all!
I was surprised that I could book a table for the following day when I called, being the week after the Eat Out Awards, the Japanese chef taking the booking. I had seen a parking sign with an arrow to the left outside the entrance, and had thought that parking was available behind the building, but was told that
it was for upstairs tenants and that we should park at the school down the road, not great on a rainy night. The waiter I asked had no clue about the parking sign outside. Luckily a parking bay became available across the road. At the entrance to the restaurant a candle is lit, and two Noren cloth dividers hang in the doorway. We were shown to a table, sitting next to another couple, so close to each other that we could hear each other’s conversations. There seemed to be some uncertainty about our booking, Continue reading →
Tourism, Food, and Wine news headlines
* The announcement by Virgin Atlantic that it will drop Cape Town from its London route from 26 April 2015, at the start of the local winter, comes as a shock to the Tourism industry. The new Immigration Regulations are said to be to blame in part, but the London-Johannesburg route has not been axed, therefore not making this reason credible. It would appear that it is an unprofitable route in winter, due to Cape Town’s terrible Seasonality problem in winter, but word received says that this is a permanent route axing! Tokyo, Vancouver, and Mumbai will also be chopped!
* Better news is that Qatar Airways is changing its three times a week via Johannesburg flights between Doha and Cape Town to five direct flights between the two cities from 3 November onwards. The change is justified on the basis of Cape Town’s popularity as a destination in Africa.
* Minister Derek Hanekom addressed the e-Tourism Africa Summit 2014 in Cape Town today, highlighting how technology has changed tourism information provision and bookings. In 2011 150000 tourists booked via SA Tourism’s online travel agency partners. Two years later this doubled to 285000. He encouraged tourist product owners to offer tourists free wifi, so that they can share their local tourist experiences via Social Media.
* The Beautiful South, a showcase of 250 wines from South Africa, Chile, and Argentina, will be held for the Continue reading →