Page 18 - foodservice Magazine July 2019

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INDUSTRY
Above: Outside the Princes Wharf shed, the Winter Feast continues with wood-powered food stalls,
live music and fire pits. Over eight nights, the Winter Feast burns through roughly 60 tonnes of wood.
Before the opening of Mona in 2011, Dyson says tourists would visit Hobart once and then tick it off. But then “suddenly things were happening, restaurants were opening, and people from interstate would say, ‘oh I need to go back to Hobart’. And now it’s quite extraordinary that when people come down for the weekend they can’t visit all the restaurants.”
June used to be “a quiet time where people became really insular,” says Dyson, but now it’s the biggest month of the year for restaurants, bars and cafes.
Analiese Gregory, head chef at two-hatted Franklin, posted on Instagram that the last Saturday of the festival was “the busiest
day of the year ... and June is our biggest month.” The Sydney local continued: “Hobart is so much more seasonal than I ever realised and Dark Mofo turns it into a raging beast.”
While the Winter Feast is the festival’s only recurring food event, the influx of tourists provides opportunity for peripheral events, pop- ups, collabs and takeovers.
On the second Monday of Dark Mofo – Franklin’s off day – floor supervisor Elenor Butler and sous chef Peter Cooksley, along with