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Café Max was the location for the 17th GeekDinner, codenamed Quarrelsome Quince. We were introduced to Café Max's spectacular buffet dinner, as well as two brand new Internet start-up businesses based in Cape Town.
The first, Personera, allows you to import photos (along with your friends' birthdays) from Facebook into a calendar that they then print and mail to you. The second was JobCrystal, a new (and different) careers portal that matches you to the most suitable available jobs, based on information you provide and questionnaires that you complete.
Dinner at Café Max was great - the dessert of Malva Pudding with Creme Anglaise was to die for, and the rare rib-eye beef was perfectly complemented by the Delheim red wine. The area that you see in this photo is a large hall alongside the main restaurant, and it's actually a lot prettier and more cosy than it appears here. It really is a nice little restaurant; take a look at their website to see what I mean.
Well done to everyone who braved the excessively high winds in Cape Town to attend GeekDinner! I spent a few minutes outside Cappello to capture a few night shots of Cape Town and found it impossible to keep my hand steady enough to take the shot. Eventually I leaned up against a seemingly-sturdy pole to steady the camera, but alas, this was even worse - the wind was rattling the pole like a jackhammer rattles the stout construction worker holding it.
For many people, the word "geek" still conjures up images of socially awkward people interested only in chemistry, physics, astronomy and computers. This is not the case at Cape Town's GeekDinner meets. Also, over the past few months I've noticed an interesting shift in the gender distribution at GeekDinner events. Even though the guys still clearly dominate in numbers, it seems as though there are more and more women at each event... which, believe me, is something that I'm confident the guys are extremely happy about.
I guess the first thing that I have to say about Neighbourhood is: "What a flippin' awesome venue!". The restaurant is located close to the top of Long Street (the vibrant side), on the upper level, from where you can watch passers-by migrating between nightclubs and bars. The restaurant owner kept an eye on the proceedings, and made sure that we had everything we needed. The service from the (beautiful) waitresses was unexpectedly attentive, giving us the feeling that they genuinely wanted to make sure that we were happy.
The buffet starter table was almost a meal in its own right, laden with trays of teriyaki and chilli chicken wings, chilli poppers, nachos, pita breads with hummus and tahina, olives, and a whole bunch of other yummy things. I had a pretty decent burger for mains, followed by ice-cream with chocolate sauce... and all of this was topped off with a great bottle of Merlot from our wine sponsor, Delheim (more about that in my next post though).
Apologies if it sounds like all we did was eat and drink :). In fact, there were a couple of goodspeakerswho kept us well entertained in between courses and table banter. Thanks also to Bryn for the well-constructed slideshow karaoke*.
*Slideshow Karaoke:"...somebody prepares a set of slides on any topic they want (we've had "Etiquette when dealing with British Royalty", "Common problems with cement tiles", and "A primer on lesser known Norse gods"). Somebody else then presents a talk based on these slides without any prior knowledge of the topic, or of the content of the slides - always to amusing effect." - Vhata Vas Hyah
