“ideal setting” for major events.
“The city can accommodate fans from
around the world, but remains accessible
and compact enough to be swept up in the
excitement that big events bring. We all
know and love the madness of February
and March – when annual celebrations like
the Adelaide Fringe, WOMADelaide and
Adelaide Festival take place – but events
in South Australia go far beyond that. They
take place throughout the year, and they’re
run by people who love what they do and are
committed to enhancing their communities,
promoting their regions and offering
entertainment for locals and visitors alike.”
Adelaide Fringe received a nod as a
Finalist in the Australian Event Awards
in 2009, while Adelaide Writers Week,
part of Adelaide Festival, won Coates
Hire Best Community Event in 2015 and
WOMADelaide won EVENTelec Best
Cultural, Arts or Music Event in 2015
and was a Finalist in the same category
in 2016, recognition that both validates
the “artistic” label Adelaide deservedly
receives and demonstrates how the State
has managed to come out on top for two
consecutive years as the outstanding
events destination.
Alongside the Santos Tour Down Under,
Events South Australia also owns and
manages several other events including
Tasting Australia, which celebrates premium
food and wine in Adelaide and provides
another opportunity for those in the events
industry to demonstrate their capability.
One of those players is renown Adelaide
caterer Blanco Food and Events, who
hosted a lunch in the Adelaide Botanic
Gardens as part of Tasting Australia,
highlighting not only the quality of their
offsite catering skills but the philosophy of
the Botanic Gardens Restaurant, one of a
number of their food ventures.
The restaurant provides a fine dining
culinary experience of the Botanic Gardens
– as far as they’re aware, no other Botanic
Gardens in the world offers an experience
quite like it – in which approximately 80
different ingredients used in their kitchen
throughout the year come from the Botanic
Gardens itself.
“There’s just a whole mix and range
of produce – some stuff you can’t find
anywhere, some stuff that they actually don’t
have the strands and species any more…just
unusual things,” says Steve Blanco, co-owner
of Blanco, on the kind of edible delights
which come out of the gardens.
He says it can be “a bit haphazard” for the
restaurant’s head chef Paul Baker, because
produce deliveries are at the whim of the
seasons in the Garden.
“That’s why the creativity part of it is
probably more important because [Paul]
needs to make use of everything that’s
ready and available,” he says.
Baker agrees, describing it sometimes as
“feast and famine”.
“Sometimes we’ve got a lot of stuff and we
have to get really creative,” he says, citing
12 Convention & Incentive Marketing, Issue 8, 2016 www.cimmagazine.com
a recent example when they had 40kg of
onions just dropped on the doorstep.
Joining the restaurant in 2014, Baker is the
first chef that’s used the Garden’s produce
to its full extent, according to Blanco.
“We’ve pretty much unlocked most of
the edible plants that we can find in that
garden over the two and half years I’ve
been there,” says Baker. “I work really
closely with the horticulture staff – work
out what we can eat, can’t eat, and there’s
a number of things that they didn’t even
know were edible that we’ve researched
and found that we can actually use. The
gardens change every day.
“A season in the garden doesn’t run for
three months – sometimes winter comes a
month earlier so we’ve got winter produce
a month or two earlier than everyone else.
Some things we can sort of pick from as
we go over the weeks and some things
once they’re ready we take them out and
make use of them. Other times we have
something quite unique and we’ll only get
one tree of it – we have our own lemon
aspen tree – and the lemon aspen was
there for two weeks then it was gone.”
Baker doesn’t try to influence what the Garden
staff plant and enjoys the unpredictability of
the offerings which are delivered to them. He
is also quite happy to let the Garden dictate
what the restaurant serves.
“Things like liquorice root which we use
on one of our beef dishes – the liquorice is
actually the core part of that dish – if we
don’t have the liquorice root any more, then