{"id":4388,"date":"2009-10-02T01:42:49","date_gmt":"2009-10-01T23:42:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.whalecottage.com\/blog\/?p=4388"},"modified":"2009-10-03T00:29:11","modified_gmt":"2009-10-02T22:29:11","slug":"balthazar-sweet-and-robben-island-sour-service-awards","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chrisvonulmenstein.com\/blog\/cape-town\/balthazar-sweet-and-robben-island-sour-service-awards\/","title":{"rendered":"Belthazar Sweet and Robben Island Sour Service Awards"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The Sweet Service Award <\/strong>goes to Ian Halfon and his team at Belthazar restaurant, a consistent winner of the Best Restaurant\u00a0in the V & A Waterfront Award.\u00a0\u00a0 Halfon is a busy man, also owning Balducci’s in the V & A Waterfront, and a franchised collection of St Elmo’s woodfired pizza branches around the country.\u00a0\u00a0 However, he is not too busy to be hands-on at Belthazar, last evening even helping in the kitchen, complete with his chef’s uniform, and to make time to chat to his customers, and to offer them a glass of wine.\u00a0\u00a0 Belthazar offers\u00a0one of the largest collections of wines-by-the-glass in South African restaurants, and serves excellent quality steaks in particular.\u00a0\u00a0 The food, service and wine range offered is exemplary.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>The Sour Service Award <\/strong>goes to Robben Island, for closing\u00a0just before\u00a0the Heritage Day long weekend, due to a technical problem with its ferry.\u00a0\u00a0 The\u00a0company announced the “indefinite” suspension of the service, while it waited for a replacement part to be flown in from Germany.\u00a0\u00a0 Tourists who had booked tickets were met with a notice, and were not contacted by the company.\u00a0\u00a0 No contingency planning had taken place, over a weekend that saw the first signs of a recovery from the poor tourism weeks preceding Heritage Day.\u00a0\u00a0 The ferry trips appear to not have been re-instated, judging by\u00a0Robben Island’s\u00a0website.\u00a0\u00a0 Robben Island’s management is regularly in the news, for alleged financial irregularities and overspending.\u00a0\u00a0 The Island is one of the most popular tourist attractions\u00a0in Cape Town, and it reflects badly on the professionalism of Cape Town as a tourist destination, especially given the 2010 World Cup being just over 200 days away.<\/p>\n

The WhaleTales Sweet & Sour Service Awards<\/strong>\u00a0are presented every Friday on the WhaleTales blog.\u00a0 Nominations for the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be sent to Chris von Ulmenstein at <\/span>info@whalecottage.com<\/span><\/span><\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 <\/span>Past winners of the Sweet and Sour Service Awards can be read on the Friday posts of this blog, and in the WhaleTales <\/span><\/strong>newsletters on the <\/span>www.whalecottage.com<\/span><\/a> website.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Sweet Service Award goes to Ian Halfon and his team at Belthazar restaurant, a consistent winner of the Best Restaurant\u00a0in the V & A Waterfront Award.\u00a0\u00a0 Halfon is a busy man, also owning Balducci’s in the V & A Waterfront, and a franchised collection of St Elmo’s woodfired pizza branches around the country.\u00a0\u00a0 However, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[3,124,248,22,21],"tags":[264,1349,2221,32378,2304,2305,1426,87,1355,2302,862,2306,283,32373,10,2303],"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