Welcome to our July newsletter!
Each month we will keep you up to date with our favourite things inside and outside the restaurants. There will be interviews, recipes and reflections written through our experience of the best place to be:
Canberra.

What is Venus Vinifera?

VV is a community of drink-minded women including those who are AFAB, non-binary and with trans experience. We provide education and events to help broaden the knowledge and opportunity in wine, beer, spirits and hospitality as a whole. We also offer two major events: Subject Matters Symposium and Frenzy: A Drinks Festival each year. These two events are open to anyone including men who either work in the industry OR are just interested in learning more and  tasting good drops.

What pushed you to create it?

Venus Vinifera started due to a constant feeling of inaccessibility and exclusion as a woman in the beverage space. After pushing for years in my early career to get in and learn and be part of the drinks industry and sometimes completely failing, I realised it doesn't always have to be like this and I can make it easier for the next generation of women coming into hospitality. I could wait around for someone to fix it or just do it myself. When I put the feelers out into the women I worked with/in the industry I quickly discovered that this was a universal feeling and that is where VV began.

What is the symposium and what can we expect?

Subject Matters: Make Your Move is our annual symposium. This year we are focusing on how to build a sustainable career in the industry. We have some awesome speakers from all over NSW with various arrays of success in the industry, coming together to talk about the hard stuff, inspire and motivate people and build our community. 

Some feature speakers include Hannah Costello - Cafe Stepping Stones, Daisy Tulley - Mucho Group, and Hany Ezzat - Ona Coffee + Ni Wares. 

On the day you can expect: 3 panel sessions and 3 specialised speaker sessions as well as food and drink from Canberra Favourites.

Trust us. And by that we mean trust Benn.
Benn and Mork Ratanakasol have more experience in the industry than most, growing up in their parents restaurant Sukothai. From opening Morks in Florey, to the Kingston Foreshore and now back home in Yarralumla with Minima we are always excited to see what these guys are doing and often talk about our favourite places to eat.

BENNS BYO FAVES
Ruby Chinese, Dickson (currently closed for renovations)
CocoNine, Kingston
Rama’s Fiji Indian, Pearce

Like most people, I’ve been hammered with endless articles, reports, and conversations about the cost of living. Fair enough, it’s affecting us all, restaurants included. I’ve been a part of many of those conversations defending the price of going out (‘Our electricity bill has increased just like yours’). However, that’s not exactly what I’d like to talk about. I would like to address the cost of restaurants, but without simply blaming inflation, wages, or the government. I’d like to talk about why I think hospitality venues are still underpriced, as frustrating as that may be to hear. 

Australia, for my mind, has the best pound for pound food and drink scene in the world. David Chang once remarked that Houston was the most worldly food city he knew because you could have a Thai restaurant next to an Italian one, next to a wine bar, with a French restaurant across the road. For Australians, that’s every country town, let alone the cities. Part of this is our cultural melting pot, and part of it is just how many venues there are. For a long time, this meant that restaurateurs, publicans, and cafe operators competed primarily through price, namely lowering it. For a long time, the only way to do this and remain profitable was through forcefully increasing productivity. Or to call a spade a spade; overworking and underpaying their staff. Wage theft. When they couldn’t cut other costs, they kept wages low, or didn’t pay superannuation, in order to succeed in a competitive environment. Anyone that worked in hospitality prior to 2020 would have stories of 80-100 hour weeks, missing super, and god forbid if you wanted a holiday. We all viewed annual leave as a bonus when you left a job.

Then covid came along, and it obviously caused a shift in a number of sectors. However, I saw first hand, a seismic shift in how hospitality venues were run for the better. Four work days became the norm, to try and mitigate the longer hours that each day required. Staff were paid if they worked above that, and taking time off wasn’t a foreign concept. This is a fantastic result, and, while there’s more work to be done, hospitality is definitely improving in the work-life balance department. However, this all comes with extra costs, as more staff are required to cover those hours. In a post covid world, with all of the stimulus money injected into the economy, this wasn’t an issue. Costs rose to accommodate this change in operations, but customers could, and would, pay it. But dining out is a discretionary industry, and customers can only bear so much. When cost of living became a familiar phrase, and the crisis began, such discretionary businesses felt concern over increasing their prices much more, for fear of losing customers to the shop that hadn’t. It felt like we’d just gotten to a sustainable business model, only for the rug to be pulled out from under us again, and any profitability we’d carved out was quickly eroded. None of this is the fault of our customers - we completely understand that it’s tough for all, and spending money on a dinner out is harder to justify nowadays. 

My fear is that we’re going to see a return to competing on price in a higher cost environment, and some businesses resort to their old wage theft ways in order to remain profitable. I hope it doesn’t happen. There is some good news starting to emerge. Rates are coming down, wages are generally up, and there is some confidence returning to the economy. Hopefully that continues. 

Looking forward.

There’s heaps of cool things happening in Canberra that don’t get the airtime they deserve. We don’t claim to know everything but here's bits and pieces from around town we are excited by in July. If we have missed something, or you want to share future events send us an email and we will try our best to include it.

Images: Cassie Abraham

LOOK

Pivot/al
Saturday 5 July -  10 August
Thursday – Sunday @10 am to 4 pm

A display home is not the place you would expect to find a curated collection of talented artists but it certainly makes sense creating context for how we can live and enjoy art at home. Curated by Louis Grant for Belco Arts Pivot/al brings together Cassie Abraham, Luke John Matthew Arnold, Gemma Brown, Madeline Cardone, Bailey Donovan, Skye Jamieson, Isabelle Mackay-Sim.

Images: Cassie Abraham

LISTEN

Gang Gang
July 6 @ 5:00 pm – 8:00 pm: Happy axe 

July 12 @ 7:00 pm – 10:00 pm: Radio Free Alice 

July 19 @ 3:00 pm – 10:00 pm: DAY 6

Dissent
July 4 @ 7:30 pm - 11:00pm: What She’s Having with The King Hits

WATCH

Elsie's Film House

Catch the last few weeks of this Cinema lounge pop up in civic square showing some of the best cult, arthouse and international favourites.

| PILOT | SUCH AND SUCH | GIFT VOUCHERS |

Any feedback, comments, or chats please reach out.

Dash, Mal, and Ross.