Year of the Foodies

Those who know us well will gladly testify that Garry and I are passionate foodies. Over the years we’ve been progressively ticking restaurants and memorable dining experiences off a forever-expanding bucket list. The last year or so has been filled with plenty of new foodie memories.

For the last seven years, we’ve gone to Melbourne on business twice a year. Each time we spend a week exhibiting at a major trade show by day before booking ourselves into some of the city’s finest restaurants at night. Over the years these culinary highlights have included Kobe Jones, Dinner by Heston (since closed and relocated to London), and Vue de Monde. Without a doubt, Vue de Monde remains one of Garry and my greatest culinary hits of all time.

This year we made the most of our return to Melbourne after a COVID-induced absence of more than 2.5 years. We finally got to sample the Teppanyaki grill at Koko in Crown Casino and spent a memorable evening at Attica. Attica was particularly interesting. For many years it was considered Australia’s best restaurant. It reimagines a range of recognisable dishes using native Australian ingredients.

For example, when we dined at Attica, we enjoyed pastrami made from Emu (it tastes like regular New Yorker pastrami), and crispy snacks made from saltbush. While the experience was unique, I personally found it a little underwhelming. The restaurant itself is rather spartan and the concept of regular food made differently wore a little thin as the evening progressed.

For me this year’s Melbourne highlight was Koko. I love the theatre of Teppanyaki and the chefs at Koko delivered in full. The menu was also peppered with plenty of unexpected flavour bombs. I’d have to say it was even better than the Melbourne institution, Kobe Jones.

This year we’ve also enjoyed lunch (twice) at Mimi’s in the Coogee Beach Pavilion, including a farewell meal for a departing staff member. On both occasions the food was superb. Caviar and Dom Perignon are always a match made in heaven, and nothing beats a towering platter of crispy Pommes Allumettes. We also enjoyed the theatrical unveiling of a neighbouring table’s salt dome baked Mud Crab. One, I’ve never seen a crab so big, and Two, I’ve never seen a salt crush so thick and hardy!

However, my ultimate foodie experience of 2022 has to be Margaret, the new Neil Perry restaurant in Double Bay. Garry and I enjoyed a memorable belated birthday dinner for myself in early November. Every dish we sampled was heavenly, including Neil’s almond-based Wedding Cake dessert filled with layers of fluffy Swiss Meringue. I subsequently attempted to recreate this dish for Garry’s birthday a few weeks later

My new EO Forum group also enjoys a meal together once a month at one of Sydney’s many reputable restaurants. To date, this has included the highly rated Botswana Butchery, Hubert’s, and the Menzies Bistro at Shell House. Garry and I have also found time to entertain a key customer at Cottage Point Inn, a waterside venue I last visited in 1998.

Finally, before I sign off, a shout-out to Automata. We enjoyed its degustation menu over winter last year before the city went into total lockdown for four soul-destroying months. The restaurant has subsequently announced it’ll be closing in early 2023. However, the meal Garry and I enjoyed was a genuine treat from start to finish. No wonder we’re constantly doing battle with an expanding waistline.

Chrismas on the harbour

We've spent time sailing on Sydney Harbour twice this month - both outings were EO events. Our nautical excursions began with the EO Sydney Chapter's annual Christmas party on 4 December. All I can say is "Wow! What an insane event!" The chapter chartered The Jackson, a stunning super yacht.  We're talking about the "lives of the rich and famous" stuff.

The Jackson is a genuine super yacht. It's 60 metres long and boasts stylish décor and furnishings across its three levels of sophisticated spaces and expansive decks. Garry and I joined 200 other guests for an unbelievably decadent evening where the Veuve Clicquot champagne flowed all night.  

I've honestly never experienced anything like it on a private yacht. As we cruised around Sydney Harbour, we were entertained by a live band, a DJ and roving circus acts.  Canapes circulated non-stop. I'd hate to think how much this lavish affair cost. EO is certainly living up to its mantra of delivering "once in a lifetime" experiences.

On Thursday this week, my EO Forum hosted its own Christmas party on Sydney Harbour.  However, our event was a far more modest affair.  We hired the stylish luxury cruiser, MV Alfie, and spent the evening quietly circling the harbour while drinking Taittinger, and dining on a slab of eye fillet, ham on the bone, oysters, prawns and an assortment of other lavish goodies.

I also got to spend some quality time with Dr Ginni Mansberg. She's one of my forum member's wives and business partners. Dr Ginni is a bit of a mini-celebrity on Australian TV, cohosting shows like Embarrassing Bodies Down Under and Things You Can't Talk About on TV. I thoroughly enjoyed getting to know her a little better. My forum really is filled with impressive people doing amazing things.

Afterwards, Garry and I went back to Julia's house in Valcuse. She's one of my forum members with a taste for the high life!  Her marble-clad home with its sweeping spiral staircase is impressive, to say the least. We seriously over-catered for the event. As a result, Garry and I have some fancy leftovers to keep us going for a few days including wine, beer and 3/4 of a massive baked salmon.

Update: 18 December

The baked salmon came in handy.  My cousin Kevin and his daughter Alex dropped by for lunch yesterday.  I've not seen Kevin since he and his wife relocated from Melbourne back to New Zealand before COVID. Garry and I entertained them with leftover salad and a massive slab of salmon which made us look like incredibly gracious hosts. 

Beachside birthday

We’ve finally dined at Jonah’s, a top-rated restaurant overlooking Whale Bay on Sydney’s northern beaches. This restaurant is something of a local institution. The venue is part of a boutique hotel complex that offers luxe weekend away packages. I shouted Garry and me for an overnight stay to celebrate Garry’s birthday in style.

The northern beaches are a unique part of Sydney. The scenic coastline, bush-clad harbour views, and laid-back lifestyle are a world away from the hustle and bustle of central Sydney. Yet they’re less than an hour from home. In fact, it takes less time to drive here than it does to reach any other coastal retreat we’d normally consider an oasis from city life.

So, was the two decades wait worth the effort? In my humble opinion, “not really”. While the ocean views were exactly as advertised, I found the French-influenced menu very salty and carb-heavy. However, our room was cozy and spacious and the views from our balcony were a joy to wake up to the following morning. We can tick this venue off our foodie bucket list but I doubt we'll return.

Back to the future

Garry and I took time out last month to conduct a strategic planning offsite for our company. It’s been three years since we last stepped back, truly paused, and thought long-term about our business.  We’ve always found it more productive if we book these events in a location that encourages us to genuinely separate ourselves from the business and clear our heads. The last time we did we saw our business almost double in size over the following three years.
 
This year we chose Lord Howe Island for our planning event.  It’s less than two hours flying time from Sydney, offers an “off the grid” lifestyle, and plenty of warm weather and scenic beauty to clear the head and refresh the mind. It’s also part of the state of New South Wales and thus is relatively “close to home”.  To help us stay focused we successfully secured an all-inclusive, special package deal from Capella Lodge.  This package included accommodation, meals and drinks, and access to a separate meeting space during the day.
 

Our five-day retreat (four nights) kicked off with a morning flight from Sydney in a tiny 36-seat Qantas Dash 8 200 series aircraft.  Qantas has two of these aging planes in its fleet. It’s kept them exclusively for flights to Lord Howe Island.  The island has an 880 metre long runway that very few commercial planes can safely land on – the 200 series is one such aircraft.
 
The Lodge collected us from the airport and took us back to the hotel.  The venue was superb. It offered stunning views towards the island's two highest peaks, Mount Gower and Mount Lidgbird.  It was the perfect place to reset ourselves and kick off our first three-hour planning session. Dinner that night was an equally superb affair. By chance, we’d arrived on the same day the lodge hosted a weekly degustation meal. Each course was a genuine treat to behold.

Day Two kicked off with more warm and sunny weather. After breakfast, we took a few hours off to explore the island using the hotel’s complimentary golf cart.  The island is a relatively compact landmass. It’s approximately 11km long and up to 3 km wide with a narrow central isthmus of less than 1km connecting two halves capped at each end by mountains. 

One side of the island features a picturesque lagoon that’s home to the world’s southernmost coral reef.  Lord Howe Island is also home to a host of unique native species including a rare giant stick island and some adorable flightless woodhens.  Our hotel had a family of woodhens living in gardens. We were lucky enough to spot three baby hens on our third day.  With all of this scenic beauty to protect, the island supports a resident population of approximately 350 people, with no more than 400 tourists permitted to visit at any one time.

After exploring the island from one end to the other, we then settled in for another afternoon of strategic business planning and intense debate. Much to our delight, the hotel took pity on us when they heard we were spending most of our time buried in our business. While we were out, it upgraded us to one of its best rooms. This certainly made it easier to focus on our work for the rest of our stay.

Our third day on the island was set aside for a team-building exercise.  It also gave us an opportunity to mull over some of our decisions and reflect away from our laptops and spreadsheets. We climbed up to Kim’s Lookout, the island’s picture-perfect, Instagram-worthy, scenic viewing point location on a hill at the island’s northern end.  The climb involved hundreds of steps that got our hearts beating.  However, the climb was well worth the effort when we reached the summit.  The view from Kim’s Lookout is as magical as every internet image suggests.

We then made our way to Ned’s Beach where the hotel had left us a BBQ picnic lunch.  BBQ outings are a bit deal on Lord Howe Island.  The local council has installed BBQ facilities across the entire island.  After lunch, we then partook in one of the island’s “must-do” tourist activities.  Ned’s Beach is a protected marine zone.  Here you can wade into the water and hand-feed the local fish. 
 
Feeding the fish was a truly memorable experience.  From a business planning perspective, it really got us thinking about how simple changes (banning fishing) can transform something normal (visiting the beach) into something unique. We returned mid-afternoon to our hotel filled with ideas for rethinking our company’s current business model.

Our final full day on the island was spent working on the business and concluding our planning offsite.  Sadly, the day started with chaos.  Our third-party warehouse had moved premises the week before our offsite. The move hadn’t gone smoothly and by Friday we had a lot of deeply unhappy customers.  We spent several hours tackling these issues before finally stepping back again to debate our future.  These discussions then carried us through to dinner and our final night on the island.

Our offsite finished the following day with an uneventful afternoon flight back to Sydney.  We returned with pages and pages of actions and strategic decisions – plus a pool of data analysis on more aspects of our business than ever before.  We also came home refreshed and ready to tackle whatever the future holds for us.  If history is anything to go by, the business will, once again, prove unrecognizable four years from now.  We also promised ourselves that we’d return to Lord Howe Island – but next time for a real holiday where work and business were set aside.

Kim's Lookout panorama

Race day in the kitchen

Confession time. We went a little feral on Melbourne Cup Day this week. A group of friends from our apartment complex booked a table for the annual “Race that Stops a Nation” lunch at Claire’s Kitchen on Oxford Street. We spent the afternoon getting entertained by several drag queens and a live band. It was a fun-filled lunch that subsequently morphed into one too many cocktails at the nearby Riley Hotel. It would be fair to say Garry and I were a little rusty the following morning.

I recently learned that The Riley Hotel opened in 1860, making it one of the oldest licensed premises on Oxford Street. It was previously known as The Brighton Hotel. According to the City of Sydney, Oxford Street evolved from an Aboriginal track ('muru') that crossed east along the ridgeline and around the bays to the southern headland of the harbour. In 1803, convicts cleared this track to provide access to the signal station at South Head, which had been built a decade earlier.

Forum rules

Regular readers will recall that I recently joined a global business networking organisation called Entrepreneurs Organisation(EO). EO splits its local chapters into smaller groups of 6-8 members (called forums). Each forum meets monthly and organizes an annual offsite retreat to bond and share life and business experiences.

On Thursday, I joined my forum for its first overnight "mini-retreat" in Canberra. Our group of seven filled our time with various activities, some professional and some for fun. We kicked off with a half-day meeting and training session at the Royal Canberra Golf Club. This included a presentation by Kirsten Peterson, a former team psychologist for American athletes at seven Olympic Games. Sadly, her session was underwhelming, so much so that I volunteered to organise the presenters for our next retreat.

We then dined at Kodiak Bar in Kingston, a bar and restaurant owned and operated by a member of my forum. The crowd that gathered was an interesting glimpse behind the curtain of Canberra's political culture. I learned that many of its patrons were rank-and-file staff from Parliament and surrounding Government offices.

The following morning we got to meet one of these political operatives. Our group was lucky enough to be hosted on a tour of Parliament House by a local territory government MP.  He took us behind the scenes of the Federal Parliament showing us the main debating chambers and, much to my delight, the broadcasting studios of major television networks inside the building.  We then finished our time in the ACT with a leisurely outdoor lunch at Caribou, another establishment owned by our forum member.

This was my first retreat event with my Forum members. It proved a great opportunity to really get to know many of them for the first time. Our next group event is a Christmas dinner party on a private yacht in Sydney Harbour. We booked the MV Alfie for an evening of wining and dining on the high seas.

Moving on (again)

After our EO event in Auckland, Garry and I flew down to Tauranga for the weekend to join my family for Mum’s 79th Birthday. It was also an opportunity to visit Mum’s new rest home. Avid readers of my blog will recall that Mum moved into Copper Crest in early June. Unfortunately, this facility ultimately proved unsuitable for reasons I won't bother to rehash here. After several incredibly stressful and traumatic weeks in August, we eventually found Mum a new place to live.

In early September she moved into Avida Bethlehem Views in northern Tauranga. This has proven to be a godsend. The home is closer to the Mount and easier to get to (it’s just a block off the main highway out of town). I’m delighted to report that Mum seems more settled and contented with herself.

Her new room looks and feels like a cozy studio apartment. It’s a lot more spacious and homely than Copper Crest with windows on two sides that give it a wonderfully light and airy presence. One bank of windows looks out over a park filled with mature trees. The surrounding common areas inside and out are also more spacious than Copper Crest and feel more like a regular home (or an upmarket hotel). I feel so much more at peace with where she’s living now.

For Mum's birthday, the family organized a picnic in the park next door. We set up tables and chairs and spent a couple of hours eating, drinking, and laughing in the Spring sunshine. Mum seemed to enjoy the day. We’ll be back again in December to join everyone for Christmas. It’ll be the first time we’ve all come together over the festive season since 2018.

UPDATE: 12 October

Mum's home has finally been sold. It's the end of an era. Matt and Shelley's new neighbour is a semi-retired man from Auckland with family who live in the neighbourhood. They're both grateful that their new neighbour is unlikely to be hosting wild parties any time soon.

Auckland adventures

Earlier this year I joined a global business networking organisation called EO (Entrepreneur's Organisation). It's an incredible global network of local chapters filled with some amazing talented people - and access to some impressive contacts and business content. I’ve been surprised to discover a number of people with high public profiles are members including two of Artiwood’s key supplier contacts in Hong Kong.

Membership comes with a range of benefits including regular networking dinners headlined by entertaining speakers, plus online and in-person learning (training) events. As part of your membership, they split local chapters into smaller groups (called Forums). To join a forum, you must apply to a forum and be voted into the group by its incumbent members. Each forum meets once a month and once a year the group organises its own mini offsite retreat to bond and share life and business experiences.

Each local chapter also organizes an annual retreat for members. Garry and I decided to join this year’s four-day retreat which was held in Auckland, New Zealand. Over four days we spent time with more than 50 members and their Significant Life Partners (SLPs) dining in some eclectic locations and learning plenty of business and life lessons from a bevy of guest speakers.

This included some of New Zealand's top All Blacks, All Black coaches, and incredibly talented entrepreneurs. I also got to me Jeff Wilson, one of New Zealand's all-time top 10 All Blacks. However, the most productive day for me was an all-day training session where we heard from three of New Zealand's most talented business entrepreneurs. Their business insights and experiences were simply mind-blowing.

In between speaking events, the group toured Auckland’s Eden Park stadium, visited a winery on Waiheke Island, and flew a helicopter over the summit of Rangitoto Island. Attendees were booked into the SO/Hotel on Auckland’s waterfront. It’s a quirky boutique hotel with superb harbour views from its rooftop terrace bar. Garry and I also squeezed in a couple of hours of dining at Viaduct Harbour before heading to the airport.