Stick to these five steps every time you order wine and it will go from what once felt like shooting darts with your eyes closed to hitting the ball out of the park and into another stratosphere. Your dinner companions will be chanting your name as you make your way around the bases.
“Collaboration underpins it all. Life is relationship based, the soul of any business”
“In this industry, 30% is really hard and 70% is fun, and the crazy thing is we spend more time kicking ourselves up the arse about the 30% than enjoying the 70%. Isn’t that nuts?”
“Hospitality is very pressured, with hard long hours, and it’s important that you have some sort of hobby or interest outside of your work that burns that stress, gives you an outlet and releases the pressure so you live to cook another day.”
“Probably by next year I’ll be phasing out of the private chef market and into the health and wellness in the corporate world. Funny how life pushes you into a direction, and then you suddenly go, “Oh yeah! Something from 8 years ago set me up on this path!”
A final face lift for what must have been a quaint old lady has breathed fresh life into this corner store. And don’t miss the courtyard bar.
“I don’t care where it comes from, if it’s a really good wine, we’ll find a home for it.” Tim at Cool Wine uses his Tasmanian connections to underpin the main stock base of his business, and finds it’s incredibly exciting to watch what began as a cottage industry expand exponentially.
Alex at Osaka Izakaya wants to survive. That’s a great goal, and one hopes that he thrives as well.
Ruben Koopman always appears calm and relaxed. But underneath, there must be a brain and imagination that never stops. And the detail at The Lounge, always amazes.
And as always, Rockwall is as alive as Donald Trump’s sex drive. So I take my hat off to those guys slamming out food like line cooks at an American county fair.