You Can Have Your Cake And Eat It, But You'll Have To Pay
The Age
Wednesday April 23, 2008
IT'S an Aussie tradition to bring a sponge to a restaurant for Mum's birthday, but increasingly we can't have our cake and eat it too.
Cakeage is the new corkage. Peeved that staff have to serve someone else's cake and wash up afterwards, and facing soaring food costs and rents, Melbourne restaurateurs are charging up to $6.50 per head for BYO gateau.Myrto Recinella, owner of Ivanhoe eatery Va Tutto, says its $3.50 per head cakeage is good value, given most customers then did not buy the restaurant's desserts, which cost $14 each."You always feel like you have to defend yourself, but it is a business at the end of the day, and we sell food," she said.A spokeswoman for Lynch's restaurant in South Yarra says they charge someone who brings a cake $5.50 per person "to plate it up" - slice it, and place it on plates with ice-cream and raspberry coulis - "because of the labour involved and the decoration we put on it. We don't just plonk it on a plate; it's all done very nicely". It's much cheaper than Lynch's $19 to $20 desserts.Peter Giannakis, owner of The Graham Restaurant and Wine Bar in Port Melbourne, "discourages" patrons from bringing cakes partly because he wants customers to focus on the restaurant's "wow factor" desserts. "It's an emotional issue," he said. "But I employ a pastry chef, a pastry chef costs a lot of money to employ . . . Why would I chop my legs off by encouraging people to bring food here?"He would "show goodwill" by allowing cake-bringers to sing Happy Birthday, but they would have to "take it home and have it for afternoon tea". If someone is insistent, he may relent and charge $6.50 a head cakeage.But Sam Raydan, owner of the barn-sized Sofia Pizza Restaurant in Camberwell, said it was "mean", "greedy" and bad for business to either deny customers the right to bring a birthday cake, or to charge them for it.He said the argument that serving customers' cakes and washing up cost too much was "rubbish". "What's it going to cost me if I bring the cake to the table? To wash up? The dishwasher's there. What's another 10 or 15 plates in the machine? What's that going to cost you, a few minutes?"
© 2008 The Age
