{"id":24700,"date":"2011-09-05T03:39:53","date_gmt":"2011-09-05T01:39:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.whalecottage.com\/blog\/?p=24700"},"modified":"2011-09-20T12:37:21","modified_gmt":"2011-09-20T10:37:21","slug":"toffie-food-festival-no-toffees-uber-design-uber-promise-under-delivery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chrisvonulmenstein.com\/blog\/cape-town\/toffie-food-festival-no-toffees-uber-design-uber-promise-under-delivery\/","title":{"rendered":"Toffie Food Festival: No toffees, \u00fcber-design, \u00fcber-promise, under-delivery!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>When writing our blogpost about the Toffie Food Festival<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, we wrote about\u00a0a number of aspects about the organisation of the Toffie Food Festival and Conference that left much to be desired, the organisers making a number of promises which they did not deliver on.\u00a0 I expressed my scepticism in the blogpost, but it was the talk by ex-blogger Julie Powell,\u00a0theme of the movie ‘Julie & Julia’<\/em>, that made me book, despite the\u00a0high price tag.\u00a0 Despite enjoying the morning sessions\u00a0on Saturday,\u00a0it was the organisers reneging on the confirmed booked secret dinner venue for Saturday evening that was the final straw, and therefore I decided to leave, with my money refunded, when the organisers\u00a0failed to fix their acknowledged booking\u00a0error.<\/p>\n

The Toffie (no explanation was given by the organisers for this odd name, and there was no toffee, except at the SA Breweries food and beer pairing) Food Festival was not explained, and probably referred to the\u00a0City Hall room with a number of stalls, creating a mini market, including stands for Woolworth’s coffee, the Queen of Tarts, Oded’s Kitchen, and a few more.\u00a0 Another room had a number of beer brands for sale.\u00a0 A further room sold pies from Jason’s, and here mini-croissants were available, being the over-promised ‘breakfast’!\u00a0\u00a0 A further room had a colourful Mexican Pi\u00f1atas design (the organisers seemed to get their countries mixed up, as a link to Argentina was intended, with a speaker from this country).\u00a0 The problem with all the extra features was that nothing was explained on arrival, or at the start of the Conference.\u00a0\u00a0 The registration desk staff, acknowledging our booking, said nothing about the bookings for the workshops running alongside the Festival, nor about the Secret Dinners, which took place in the homes of a number of hosts on Saturday evening.\u00a0 One had to find out everything oneself.<\/p>\n

The Toffie Food Conference was a one and\u00a0a half day presentation of a random collection of speakers, some having nothing to do with food at all (these were last minute replacements for initially advertised international speakers, the programme having been amended as late as\u00a0two weeks before its start, Wolfgang Koedel of Paulaner\u00a0 Brauhaus\u00a0and\u00a0perfumer Tammy Fraser being added).\u00a0The only common element\u00a0some speakers had was that they had published books, but there was no theme commonality for the Conference overall.\u00a0 The venue was a tacky dark room in the City Hall, on a noisy corner with taxi-hooting disturbance from outside, and not in the downstairs main City Hall auditorium, as one had expected.\u00a0 We sat on uncomfortable cheap plastic chairs which had been wrapped in brown paper (this was the ‘creative’ decoration used throughout), which meant that there was a lot of rustling in the venue when one moved on one’s chair. The organisers clearly struggled to fill the venue, it not being full, and\u00a0‘gave away’ tickets on Groupon(unfair to those who paid for the weekend in full), as well as offered seats\u00a0as give-aways on\u00a0M-Net.\u00a0\u00a0 Even on late Saturday afternoon, free Secret Dinner seats were offered via Twitter!<\/p>\n

The organisers of the Toffie Food Festival and Conference were artist Peet Pienaar (a grumpy looking ex-rugby player with a Paul Kruger look, and who has a bizarre CV on Wikipedia<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, which I should have read before booking) and Hannerie Visser (ex-publisher of VISI<\/strong> and TASTE <\/strong>at New Media Publishing), both of never-heard-of-before The President design agency, with what must be the sparsest website ever seen, with\u00a0design work done for Babylonstoren, BOS, TriBeCa, Navigator Films, and Bruce Lee magazines!\u00a0 \"\"<\/a>Neither have\u00a0any food experience, nor have they organised a Conference before.\u00a0 Copied from Argentina, they organise secret CHOP dinners in their offices, with Pienaar cooking bizarre meals (e.g. veal brain ravioli, the dinner and drinks\u00a0costing R350)\u00a0on a\u00a0weekly\u00a0basis.\u00a0\u00a0 This concept\u00a0was built into the Toffie Food Festival, each delegate being allocated to a host, at whose home one would have dinner.\u00a0Hosts were mainly from the decor design field. \u00a0While it was meant to be a random match of delegates\u00a0with host venues, I liked the sound of GreyLamp, being a pop-up\u00a0restaurant, and therefore I wrote to Visser, requesting this as\u00a0my dinner venue.\u00a0 She agreed by e-mail a few days before the event.\u00a0 When I\u00a0found the desk\u00a0dealing with the dinners,\u00a0I was given details of a completely different host, an editor of an art magazine, who had nothing to do with food at all!\u00a0 There was no explanation for the error, and one of The President staff promised to sort it out, promising to find me\u00a0to confirm the correction.\u00a0 As I had experienced during the booking process,\u00a0this promise was not met, and I had to return to the desk again. Lying on the table was a\u00a0(brown paper wrapped) ‘present’ for me, with the news that I could not attend the GreyLamp\u00a0dinner, as it was fully booked!\u00a0 I went looking for Visser, but saw Pienaar first, and he rudely told me that it was tough that they had made an error in promising the venue.\u00a0 This was echoed by Visser, when I finally found her.\u00a0 It was the way in which she spoke to me, in that it was her right to\u00a0take a promise away\u00a0by making a mistake,\u00a0that annoyed me.\u00a0 When she offered to refund the money I had paid in full, I accepted it, as their error was a major let-down.\u00a0\u00a0So while I missed out on Julie Powell’s talk after all of that, I was happy to leave this badly organised space, and was able to follow her speech on Twitter.\u00a0 I couldn’t help but smile when I saw a number of disparaging Tweets about the poor Braai that closed off the Festival yesterday, the promised Argentinian Asado barbeque having fallen away, and the R150 Braai package (for those that brought partners) consisted of only a chop, a sausage and a roll, once again a false over-promise.<\/p>\n

The speakers at\u00a0the Toffie Conference tried their best to make up for the poor organisation and behind-the-scenes dramas happening outside the presentation venue:<\/p>\n

*\u00a0 Kobus van der Merwe, of the cutest Paternoster eatery Oep ve Eet<\/a><\/strong><\/span>, which I discovered a year ago, spoke about his love for foraging for West Coast foods in the preparation of his meals, including soutslaai, dune spinach, veldkool, seevygies, waterblommetjies, wild\u00a0sage, and wild rosemary.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\"\"<\/a>He grows some of his own vegetables and herbs, and has access to free-range farm eggs, Khoisan salt, bokkoms, cow’s milk, and flour close by.\u00a0 Not only do Kobus’ dishes look beautiful from the colourful wild plants he adds, but he is also inspired by shapes from nature, having developed a breadstick in the shape of a branch, and uses streussel to create the look of soil.\u00a0 Bobotie made with calamari, meat or vegetables are a staple at his restaurant, as are gemsbok sosaties, he said.\u00a0 The books by Louis Leipoldt and Renata Coetzee are his food inspiration.\u00a0Kobus calls his\u00a0focus at Oep ve Eet ‘Earth-to-plate’,<\/em> or ‘Terroir food’<\/em> His food ideas and creativity in its presentation\u00a0are well worth a book, but\u00a0can already be seen on his blog Sardine Toast<\/strong><\/span>.<\/a><\/p>\n

*\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\"\"<\/a>Eloise Alemany is a small-print-run publisher of her own books, written in Spanish, and which she described as combination food journal, cultural diary, story book and cook book.\u00a0 She has French parents, grew up in Japan, ran ID <\/strong>magazine in the USA for a while, before moving to Buenos Aires.\u00a0\u00a0Her passion is photography and publishing, she said.\u00a0 The choice as speaker was unusual, as many a local cook book writer and publisher could have probably been more useful to food writers wishing to have guidelines about how to get their work published.\u00a0 Ms Alemany’s books were available for sale, but are not\u00a0available in English.\u00a0 The covers of the books\u00a0‘Libro de Cocino’<\/em> and ‘Cuaderno Dulce’ <\/em>are beautiful,\u00a0but have no food in them.\u00a0\u00a0She launched secret dinners in unique venues, such as an art gallery and a shoe shop, each with a theme, first for friends, and then expanded these when the unusual dinners received\u00a0coverage in the\u00a0Buenos Aires\u00a0media.\u00a0 Ms Alemany described herself as an ‘accumalator’ of beautiful things, which come in useful for the styling\u00a0for shoots.\u00a0\u00a0Buenos Aires experienced a ‘restaurant food revolution’ after the country’s\u00a0financial crisis five years ago, and it led to interesting small neighbourhood restaurants opening.\u00a0She encouraged delegates to stick to their vision, and to take risks in doing so.\u00a0 Food styling must tempt the reader, it must inspire the reader\u00a0in giving ideas of how to serve a dish, and it must be a memorable composition, she advised.\u00a0 She varies her styling, some being busy, and others neutral.\u00a0 She publishes a print run of 1000 books, distributing her books via small design shops in the main.\u00a0 She concluded with the advice that one should do what one enjoys, and not that which one is good at.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0\u00a0 Anna Trapido was a lively and informative speaker about the foods that have shaped Nelson Mandela’s life, being the author of ‘Hunger for Freedom’<\/em>, and was the theme for the unusual lunch we were served on Saturday.\u00a0 We received so much information that I have written a separate blogpost\u00a0about it<\/strong><\/a>, to be published later this week.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0\u00a0 I was very surprised when I saw a Taiwanese Barista featured on the programme, and even more so when I heard him speak his language, having an interpreter with him on the stage.\u00a0 Once again, I wondered why an international speaker had to be brought in for this talk, when Cape Town has some excellent coffee specialists.\u00a0 From Twitter, highlights of this talk\u00a0by World Barista champion\u00a0Tung-Yuan Lin were his development of Latte Art, going beyond the usual heart and leaf designs. He opened his first coffee shop GaBee six years ago, serving 100 different types of drinks.\u00a0 After winning the barista competition, he pushed himself to develop new ideas, by using local Taiwanese ingredients such as sweet potato and melon; coffee, soda water\u00a0and ginger; coffee and grapes to create a ‘red wine’; sweet corn soup coffee; creating ‘drinkable desserts’.\u00a0 He advised delegates to push themselves to try unique combinations of ingredients to create as drinks.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0\u00a0 Tammy Frazer’s talk on ‘Gourmand fragrances’ seemed completely out of place at a Food Conference.\u00a0\u00a0Her talk generated few Tweets.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0 Wolfgang Koedel of Paulaner Brauhaus talked about beer, describing it as ‘liquid bread’.\u00a0 Draught beer is ‘cool and trendy’ again, he said. During the World Cup 72000 pints of Paulaner were drunk.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0\u00a0 Renata Coetzee wrote ‘Koekemakranka: Khoi-Khoin Kultuurgoed en Kom-kuier-Kos’<\/em>, a Gourmand World Cookbook Award winner.\u00a0 \"\"<\/a>Her interest in food culture goes back 60 years, incorporating etiquette and folklore too.\u00a0 She was particularly interested in African food culture, which had not been written about previously.\u00a0Early civilisations would have eaten a lot of shellfish, bulbs and wild animals, she said.\u00a0 The Khoi prepared food in claypots, and through mixing foods, stews were born.\u00a0 Fat from sheeps’ tails was the most common ingredient of Khoi dishes.\u00a0 Ms Coetzee has reworked the traditional Khoi recipes to make them palatable for Westerners.<\/p>\n

*\u00a0 \"\"<\/a>Julie Powell’s success as a blogger, and subsequent author, in documenting her cooking of Julia Child’s recipe book in one year,\u00a0and leading to the making of the movie ‘Julie & Julia’<\/em>, cost her her marriage, which became the theme of her second book, called ‘Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat, and Obsession’.<\/em> With her marriage on the rocks, Ms Powell decided to do a butcher’s course, a good escape for her, and she enjoyed ‘hacking up meat’.\u00a0 It is very ‘hip’ to be\u00a0a butcher these days, she said. She is concerned about the origin of\u00a0her meat, and it must be organic, sustainable, and hormone-free.\u00a0 \u00a0For her, food has good, joyous, generous and loving memories, as well as nasty and divise\u00a0memories.\u00a0 She turns to food in times of crisis.\u00a0She said that she was judged for being a blogger, and stopped blogging when her first book was published.\u00a0 She does not follow blogs now, she told Elle Decor<\/strong>.\u00a0 She watches a lot of TV, but does not watch food programmes, finding them boring. In New York pop-up restaurants and food trucks are a new trend.\u00a0 ‘Technology and blogging have woven us together and made the food conversation more cacophonous than ever before’<\/em>, she said.\u00a0 An increasing number of people want to know where their food comes from ethically and environmentally.\u00a0 Ms Powell is working on her third book, not specifically about food.<\/p>\n

It was interesting that Cape Town Tourism did not sponsor the Toffie Food Festival and Conference, as it did the ‘100 Women 100 Wines’ event<\/span><\/strong><\/a> a week ago, and they only wrote two Tweets about\u00a0this event.\u00a0 One would\u00a0have thought\u00a0that the tourism body would offer equal attention to all events taking place in Cape Town, and that it would have wanted to demonstrate its tourism leadership by having a visible presence at the event, given its stated focus on Food tourism.\u00a0 One wonders what the policy is of Cape Town Tourism in its sponsorship of events, and how it decides\u00a0which events will receive\u00a0monetary support.<\/p>\n

The Toffie Food Festival and Conference was poorly organised, and their over-promised benefits and poor communication are\u00a0unprofessional.\u00a0 They have a lot to learn before they attempt to host another such event next year.<\/p>\n

POSTSCRIPT 5\/9<\/strong>: Sonia Cabano has written in support of our observation about the lack of value\u00a0for money of the event, as follows:\u00a0 “Yes, so ToffieFood was expensive and underdelivered. We all know that, and we are all discussing it”. <\/em><\/p>\n

POSTSCRIPT 6\/9:<\/strong> We copied the above sentence by Sonia Cabano from a comment she wrote to this blogpost. \u00a0As the rest of the comment was untruthful, disparaging and defamatory, we deleted it, and posted one sentence from it in the blogpost. \u00a0She Tweeted a number of times that she felt that the cost of the Toffie Food Festival was too high, but appears to have subsequently deleted these Tweets.<\/p>\n

POSTSCRIPT 7\/9<\/strong>: Sonia Cobana has Tweeted her Comment that she sent to this blogpost, which we have not allowed. \u00a0She is blatantly dishonest in claiming that she was with me when I talked to the organisers Hannerie Visser and Peet Pienaar. \u00a0 She walked past us while I spoke to Peet Pienaar, gave him her new recipe book ‘Relish’ launched earlier that day, and walked off. \u00a0She was not party to any of the discussions I had with the organisers. \u00a0I left the event with a staff member of The President (organisers of the Toffie Food Festival), and not a security person, so that he could collect the delegate badge from me, walking me to my car in an area that is not particularly safe. \u00a0 It appears that she is Tweeting this disparagement in retaliation to our blogposts about Cape Town Tourism, having hounded me on Friday evening, calling seven times to beg me to not write about Ms Grove anymore, being her friend. \u00a0I explained that nothing is written about Ms Grove or Mrs Helmbold in their personal capacity, but in that of their work for Cape Town Tourism.<\/p>\n

POSTSCRIPT 10\/9<\/strong>: \u00a0One of the Surprise Dinner hosts told me today that they had been very disappointed with the organisation, only having 13 of the 30 booked Toffie Food Festival delegates arrive, and many of these were ‘freebies’, who had received the dinner place for free, in a last minute desperate attempt by the organisers on Twitter. Hosts were given a budget of R150 per head for a three course meal, and were paid in Woolworths vouchers by the organisers. \u00a0Spier sponsored the wine. One wonders why Woolworths backed an unknown ad agency in putting on a first-time food festival and conference that clearly is not their field of expertise, was not well-organised, and was controversial, sullying their own brand.<\/p>\n

POSTSCRIPT 11\/9<\/strong>: \u00a0In her (libelous) report on the Toffie Food Festival, which she did not attend in full, given that the launch of her new book ‘Relish’ co-incided with Saturday morning of the Festival, for the BY<\/strong> supplement to Beeld, Die Burger<\/strong>, and other News24 titles, Sonia Cabano confirmed the complaints about the expense of attendance. \u00a0She gets the Festival cost wrong at R1800 (it was R1710), and writes about the near give-away of tickets on Groupon to fill the Festival. \u00a0She also mentions that no speakers of colour were included in the Festival programme, and the disappointing food market, which offered nothing new, most of the stallholders selling their wares at weekly markets too. \u00a0She also writes about the complaints about the poor Sunday lunch braai, and that Julie Powell, the keynote speaker, was a disappointment, being ‘babelaas’ from the Secret Dinner the night before (‘…dat haar aanbieding die dag daarna belemmer is deur haar selferkende hewige babelaas’) <\/em>! \u00a0Her report confirms that I made the right decision to leave the Toffie Food Festival on Saturday afternoon, after the Secret Dinner booking mismanagement, which was admitted to by the organisers, and therefore they refunded my fee.<\/p>\n

POSTSCRIPT 14\/9<\/strong>: \u00a0Today we received an e-mail from the Toffie Food Festival organisers, advertising their Toffie Food Festival food tour to Buenos Aires from 23 – 30 October, in conjunction with TASTE<\/strong> magazine, at a cost of R 28426 for a single and R23327 for a double, inclusive of the flight, accommodation and meals.<\/p>\n

POSTSCRIPT 20\/9<\/strong>: \u00a0Dax Villanueva, of Relax with Dax Blog, is also rather critical of his experience of the Toffie Food Festival.<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com<\/a> Twitter: @WhaleCottage<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When writing our blogpost about the Toffie Food Festival, we wrote about\u00a0a number of aspects about the organisation of the Toffie Food Festival and Conference that left much to be desired, the organisers making a number of promises which they did not deliver on.\u00a0 I expressed my scepticism in the blogpost, but it was the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[4795,3,124,266,21],"tags":[12566,13204,12987,12977,7303,3512,7434,8239,9639,3149,2285,13184,2937,13186,32366,85,13187,32378,1240,13196,3144,5452,13193,13205,12984,13177,8815,13208,13207,11188,13199,13200,12992,13188,13181,13033,12985,11786,13203,12976,9322,4954,13201,13198,13195,11477,1406,13185,32392,2875,11355,4952,4932,13183,5216,13182,13178,13206,11380,4820,13034,13176,13194,13179,8739,4860,52,13180,9799,13192,12975,12973,10538,13197,1587,7152,13190,32373,3055,13035,171,531],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t