We held this last night, not quite the numbers we were hoping for but we all still had an exceptional evening.  My thanks go to Ben from Carte Blanche Wines for hosting the evening, Tamsin from Wadebridge Wines for helping to put the evening together and all my team at the hotel for running the event so smoothly.

The menu that Adam put together read really well and was even better on the plate: the guests who had not eaten with us before were really surprised!  I certainly think we’ll see them again.

The wine focus of the evening was on the small, artisan producers from the Barossa Valley in south Australia.  There is a growing group of wine makers who are producing really fine wines from small parcels of old vines, some planted over 100 years ago.  These were  beautiful wines, really expressing the grapes but more importantly the region and the essence of terroir: much more like the French do!  As the great Australian wine lake drops these peaks of quality are starting to show through and are well worth searching out for a special treat.

I’ll be talking to Tamsin next week to see when we can plan the next dinner!

This last few weeks have been pretty busy, trying out new things and looking at some new developments.

The most interesting from a foodie point of view is that we’ve at last managed to find a supplier who can deliver us free range eggs on a daily basis.  This has been a bone of contention in the past and some guests have expressed their surprise that we weren’t using free range.

Moving on from my earlier post about the social media sites I am very pleased to say we’re now live on Facebook with a grand total of 13 fans already!  Twitter is on the way but Amy is putting the effort into the Facebook page first while doing some reading on Twitter at the same time.

On a more mundane level Peter has nearly finished decorating the restaurant.  This is a big project as it is such a big room but also an extraordinary shape.  We’ve managed to do this in sections so it hasn’t been too disruptive but we do pass on our thanks to all our guests who have been sitting having breakfast or dinner looking at our very attractive lining paper!

More plans for the new financial year - keep an eye out for more news later!

This usually involves rushing around on the Saturday afternoon getting a few statistics together to put a quick overview in place and then creating a few ideas and suggestions what we will and won’t be doing in the next month or two.  Today I’ve been trying to do a bit more so I’m further ahead of the game come Tuesday morning!

Amy went to a course as part of her ILM / UCP project on Tuesday and one of the things they looked at there was Ansoff Matrices - dissecting the sales effort into different sectors so you do the right things for the right people.  I thought this would be a good idea to look at ahead of next week’s meeting so did some web research and started putting my matrix together (to be compared with Amy’s later).  As part of this I’ve found some fascinating information on different areas to look at, both to encourage people back and to find new people.  A large part of this was on social networking so Amy will be looking at Twitter and Facebook shortly, I thought I’d have a look at Flickr - the photo sharing site.

I have set up an account for the hotel and have put a few pictures on there, more to follow later - we’ve got loads we can use!  Have a look at the album here and let us know what you think - there’s space for comments!  If you want to add your own pictures please do.

It is really encouraging to see the team contributing to the development of the hotel and really taking a pride in seeing what they can do to make things better here.  Following my visits to The Nare and Carlyon Bay last week with Andrea from The Fowey Hotel I had thought about trying to keep the bar door closed to encourage our guests to use the main glass door into the lounge.  Mel had a meeting with her restaurant team on Sunday morning and part of this was to look at our standards and they discussed this suggestion.

It was a great pleasure for me then to see the bar door closed on Tuesday evening and for Mel to say that Danni was going to try working like that and to see how she got on.  I am very pleased to say that it worked very well.  I did have to explain to one guest last night why the door was shut but he understood and thought it was a very good idea.

When our previous team of contractors was working for us they had redecorated the hall and all the doors.  I wanted to take the “Captain’s Bar” sign off the door so had a little look behind it yesterday morning and was not at all surprised to see that they hadn’t taken it off to paint behind it!  Luckily Ginty found a tin of the same paint so we were able to remove it and paint over the white rectangle as well as touch up the door.

If we think we need to we’ll have a sign made for further down the corridor to show people where the door to the lounge and Cafe Bar is but hopefully we will be able to tell enough people as they come in!

Here’s to more success and well done to the team for taking this challenge on.