Dangers of oversell

Press, 5 March 1988, Page 22

Dangers of oversell

Criticism of the ' Taste New Zealand campaign does not end with the listings, las Christchurch restaurateur, Graham Brown of Scarborough Fare, has found. i A member of the! campaign’s planning board, he has been fielding the flak since two wellknown Auckland j chefs dismissed the campaign as a waste of time and said J|ts regional emphasis was unrealistic. “It’s awfully hard to promote a New Zealand style,” he says. “I accept some of the criticisms: our cuisine can’t really be - regional as in France. i “But we can make people pware of the areas!from which

some of the better products come, such as Bluff oysters, Stewart Island salmon, and Kaikoura crayfish. The other thing we want is to encourage restaurants to call things by their proper names on menus, not make up fancy ones. ! “Unfortunately, we don’t really have a unique cuisine. We’re a very young nation, and we’ve borrowed from here, there and everywhere.” He has heard people describe our style of cooking as “Franglaise.” He agrees there is also a problem of availability of speciality foods. “They have become harder to

get, mainly because of cost — they’re pricing themselves out of the market,” he says. Scallops are a typical example. “Scallops last year were Just impossible to get, and we ended up importing Japanese ones. All our quota is exported because we can get more for it overseas.” j

He thinks 1 there may be a : case for introducing a quota ! system for the domestic mar- i ketJ “We need to promote our! country here before overseas — i we’ve no hope otherwise.

“Let’s face ;it, tourism is on a bit of a wane. It needs as much help as possible.”