Tag Archives: Wall Street Journal Europe

Changes made to Eat Out Restaurant Awards to improve credibility!

New Media Publishing has released the results of its qualitative and quantitative research conducted amongst top chefs and restaurant diners, respectively, in guiding the 2014 Eat Out Top 10 Awards this year.  The proposed changes are likely to improve the image of the Eat Out Restaurant Awards, which reached an all-time low in the past two years.

To recap: Eat Out editor Abigail Donnelly lost credibility for offering (undisclosed) menu consulting services to the newly established Makaron restaurant at Majeka House two years ago, a restaurant which was awarded the Boschendal Style Award in that year, personally chosen by Mrs Donnelly!  Even worse for her reputation was the appointment of herself as the sole Eat Out Top 10 Restaurant Awards judge in that year, having fired her co-judges (MasterChef SA judge) Pete Goffe-Wood, Anna Trapido (author of the book on Nelson Mandela’s eating and drinking habits), and Chef (and MasterChef SA Culinary Manager) Arnold Tanzer.  To fix the dissatisfaction following this fiasco, Mrs Donnelly chose to appoint an unknown British food blogger and occasional online Wall Street Journal newsletter writer Bruce Palling, who proved to be a disaster, with no scruples in divulging his judgement of our top restaurants six months after evaluating them, trashing all but four restaurants, and refusing to return for the Eat Out Top 10 Awards gala dinner because he was not offered a Business Class ticket by New Media Publishing.  Not only did we criticise the choice of appalling Mr Palling as a judge, but Top 10 Chef George Jardine Continue reading →

How much does Bruce Palling really know about food and wine? Not much, it seems!

Speaking to some of the chefs whose Eat Out Top 20 restaurants were bashed by blogger Bruce Palling in the past few days, a new picture emerges, in that he appears to have enjoyed our South African wines so much that he seems to have made a number of errors in his ‘reviews’ of the restaurants, writing about them six months after visiting them, misspelling wine and dish names, and even getting the meat types he was served wrong!  He has done our country’s restaurant industry great damage and harm, and demoralised our country’s best chefs.

Palling had two bottles of wine per meal on average, and four bottles per day, on each of 15 days, a total of 60 bottles he blogged proudly, now an expert on South African wines too! Some of Palling’s faux pas were the following:

*   Ordering Steenberg at Planet Restaurant, which he called ‘Steenburger’!

*   He couldn’t spell Biesmiellah and denningvleis, even though he Tweeted about his (private) meal directly from the restaurant!

*   He got the Vriesenhof variety he BYO’d at Makaron Restaurant incorrect, mistaking Continue reading →

Whale Cottage Blog: Restaurant Specials tops in 2012!

Before the new working year kicks in tomorrow, when most return to work, we have taken stock of our blog.  Last year we had just over 401000 unique pageviews, and the winter Restaurant Specials blogpost was by far the most popular. Most traffic came via Google searches, and interestingly Facebook generated three times the volume of traffic to the blog compared to Twitter.  More than 2000 subscribers receive the latest blogpost daily on RSS feed subscription.

We cannot always predict what drives traffic to the blog.  The three best read Blog days, with over 2800 unique pageviews each, were 11 January (Cruise liners mean ‘The World’ to the V&A Waterfront: Cape cruise crisis), 23 April (Chef Bruce Robertson returns to Cape Town, plain sailing at The Boat House), and 9 November (Spier Sweet Service and City of Cape Town Sour Service Awards).  Interesting is that the blogpost we wrote on 18 April in 2011 about the unfortunate passing of the President of Ferrero Rocher in Cape Town still achieves daily readership, and was the second best read blogpost last year.  The top ten Continue reading →

New Year kicks off with Twitter bullying, bashing, and blackmail!

The past twenty four hours have seen bullying, bashing, and blackmail on Twitter, kick started by an abusive Tweet by über Tweeter Jane-Anne Hobbs Rayner, who accused us of ‘cyber bullying‘ her ‘friends’ Mariette du Toit-Helmbold (CEO) and Skye Grove (Communications and PR Manager) of Cape Town Tourism, supermarket wine promoter Michael Olivier, and Eat Out editor Abigail Donnelly!   Not only was her stream of Tweets disparaging, but she also blackmailed her 5000-odd Followers with the threat of being unfollowed!  One would have expected the New Year to have had a gentler start!

Hobbs is a ‘mommy food blogger‘, her Juno and now Scrumptious blogs having impressed in the past with the quality of her photographs, and portfolio of recipes.  In the time that we have known her, we have had little interaction, seeing each other at odd Franschhoek Continue reading →