42 Degrees South: January 2011

Perhaps a little belatedly but I’ll blame the time difference – happy new year! I guess it’s been about 5 or 6 weeks since my last update and as I reflect back over the period it’s quite clear that it’s been an eventful time for us. In summary, we’ve had our first summer season in the restaurant (together with the holidays over here, Xmas and NYE), we’ve launched our new menu’s (both food and drink), we bought, setup and moved into a new home, enjoyed a visit from my sister and her boyfriend (our first house guests!), celebrated a friends beautiful outdoor wedding at Stuart’s Bay, I had a birthday (34 years young!), hosted a house warming / birthday celebration at our new place, Rich and I have been learning to surf, celebrated Australia Day and Brierlie and I are the proud parents of our brand new furry baby!

Drunken Admiral Update

As you might expect, the last 6 weeks in the restaurant have been our busiest yet and obviously this is linked to the massively inflated Hobart population over this period. In the run-up to Christmas, we had lots of work Christmas parties, then Christmas itself (which we managed to enjoy as it’s the one day of the year that the restaurant closes) quickly followed by influx of “yachties” as the annual Sydney to Hobart yacht race storms into town - the winners arriving by the 28^th of December - which coincides nicely with the start of the Taste of Tasmania Festival which is basically a week long food and drink fest. Then of course the Moorilla Hobart International tennis tournament (not quite Wimbledon I’ll admit) kicks off and a brand new museum of art has just opened (http://mona.net.au/whats-on/) and the list goes on…

Front of House team on NYE at the DA (seen those outfits before anyway??)

The Cocktail King?

Fireworks at NYE (and yup, that's a parrot perched on my shoulder)

It has been a very busy time in the restaurant and a key challenge has been ensuring that we have enough staff rostered on each night, made especially difficult as there is so much fun stuff going on in and around Hobart over the holiday period and for a Uni student earning a bit of cash, the pull of one of the big music festivals will often take precedence over wanting to work in the restaurant. Which sucks for us. But one way or another we managed to get through pretty much unscathed and we’ve certainly learnt a thing or two about how we might manage things differently going forwards!

Since we started officially on the 1^st of October 2010, we have been tracking stats and running some analysis to see how we’re going. Well, what did you expect? After 10 years of working in business consulting, my love of numbers and spreadsheets was hardly going to dissolve overnight. Anyway, I won’t bore you with the detail but from the 1^st of October through to the 15^th of January, we have been operating for 107 days and we have now had a total of 15,126 covers (i.e. diners) in the restaurant. Which averages out to approximately 141 covers per night – but as you’d expect the mean is typically lifted by a busier Friday and Saturday and lowered by the Sunday – Thursday run.

Our new menu’s have launched and we’re very pleased with them now that they’re out there – which actually proved trickier than I had anticipated. Lining up staff (Front of House and kitchen), the design and production of the menu’s themselves, the till (including prices and products) and computerised order management system and stock itself proved to be a logistical challenge worthy of a crack team of Accen.ture consultants.

9 Service Street, Glebe, 7000, Tasmania

This is our new home address for any of you eagerly anticipating a forwarding address for any belated Xmas / birthday / house-warming or “just because” gifts. We completed on the 23^rd of December, literally just scraping through so that we could move in before Christmas and suffice to say, we absolutely love our new home! We fell in love with it on our very first viewing back in November and just knew that we would move hell and high water in order to make it ours. The move day itself (23^rd of December) was a pretty crazy day as we had to wait for the completion to go through before we received the keys whilst also moving our entire worldly belongings (mainly still packed into the 23 boxes stored under Craig’s home) and also collect an entire household’s furniture and fittings in order to make the shell of a house a home. And we couldn’t have managed it without our team of very generous volunteers : a BIG thank you to Craig, Leonie, Seb, Luke and Grant (plus Grant’s brother-in-law!).

The area itself is called the Glebe and it's very well located for us - you can walk easily into the city centre, it takes about 2 minutes to drive to the restaurant and I can walk to my tennis club in about 45 seconds! It's also very easy to get out of town as we have easy access to the main highways and we're set on a steep hill so we have a lovely view over Hobart and Mount Wellington from the front of the house. In short, we're very happy with it!

Dining area and front decking (Mt Wellington in background)

Celebratory glass of bubbly on Moving-In day with Prancer (visited at Xmas)

Our first Christmas in our new home (house keys in Oz are a little bigger than back in the UK)

Building our BBQ (much less fun than cooking with it)

Sam’s Visit

…And as we had moved into our new home just before Xmas, we were able to offer Sam and Chris (long lost school friend from Hong Kong days – now her boyfriend!) their own bedroom at our place when they visited us for a few days in early January. Whilst we couldn’t let go of the restaurant’s reigns whilst they were here, we were able to arrange our days off so that we could enjoy their visit with them. For me personally, it was great to have Sam visit us as I hadn’t seen any of my own family since we left the UK back in mid-September and it meant a lot to me to be able to introduce her to my new life over here. So we had our first house guests and we now look forward to many more so please can you all get onto booking your flights…!

Taste of Tasmania Festival 2011 (Sam, Brierlie, me, the P, Eriko and Chris)

Hobart view from Mount Wellington

Hobart's waterfront (with the DA in the background : LHS)

Wicket Hunter Godfrey-Kemp

And as life hasn’t been quite hectic enough already, we thought we’d add an extra little ingredient into the mix and find ourselves a puppy to look after. And this has come in the form of a Shih Tsu furry baby whom we have named “Wicket Hunter Godfrey-Kemp” and he was my birthday present (best present EVER!). The name Wicket came from his uncanny resemblance to the lead Ewok starring in the Star Wars trilogy and Hunter from Brierlie’s love of the irony in this naming. We picked Wicket up on a Saturday about two weeks ago and he is now 9 weeks old, extremely loving, highly mischievous and playful (until he crashes out to recharge his Duracell batteries every couple of hours) and exceedingly NOT house trained. But we adore him and our house would seem very empty without him already.