Posts Tagged ‘leeds’

It has been two and a half years since we launched the Leeds Restaurant Guide. It originally came out as an eBook. This is a natural format for it. You can search it, index it and update it. It works great as an eBook.

However, there is something magical about a physical book. Something that you cannot replicate with an electronic copy. I always wanted to do a print edition alongside it but the logistics of it were sizeable.

One of the great things about the eBook edition is the speed we can put out updates. In its basic form, the guide is not a book: it’s a database. In fact, that is how we store all the information. I wrote a custom content management system to handle it all. This takes all the reviews in and spits out an eBook in a matter of minutes. If we wanted to publish a new edition, we could do within an hour.

The print route is more difficult. Print books do not have the fluid content support that eBooks do. You have to design for a fixed layout, fudge pages and spend a huge amount of time getting it all right. Then if you want to make any changes, you have to re-done everything. Possibly the entire book. That would cause a huge time-lag and that just did not cut it for me. The guide evolves and the print edition needed to be able to evolve with it.

Thankfully, after several failed attempts at getting the system correct, we finally have it in place. It is not quite as fast as the eBook, but gives us the ability to publish a new edition within 24 hours. This means that the print edition will not be a second-class citizen in comparison to the eBook.

Initially, the book is available on Amazon. In the future: who knows where else!

Dock 29 is a bar at Leeds Dock. They recently ran a competition where they gave away 29 sets of breakfasts at no cost to people working at the Sky office. It was a competition that most people won. I felt a bit bad for the select few who didn’t.

It was very nice of them, and a good way to promote their breakfast delivery service.

I am dubious about their business model however. The sandwiches are £4.50 each. For this you get your choice of sauce, bacon or egg, which s a vegetable topping and a sauce. Or you can have the whole lot for £7.50. Ideally I think the system would be more flexible.

£4.50 for a bacon sandwich is a lot of money. Even in Harrogate I Was paying significantly less than that. That might be okay if it was an especially large and tasty sandwich, but the one I had was neither of those.

The other problem is that you have to order a minimum of five items. That means convincing four friends that they also want to spend £4.50, putting a minimum spend of £22.50 for breakfast. Not only is that a lot of money, but that is a lot of effort. You have to self-organise into teams of five to get your sandwich and you have to do all of this by a deadline of 9:30am.

Why I would do this when I could simply pop in to Greg’s on the way to work and save myself significant time/hassle and money seems a bit of a mystery to me.

I am currently working on a printed version of the Leeds Restaurant Guide. It has been a long time coming. Three years ago, when we launched the guide, I always wanted to do a print version. However, the logistics of doing so have been complicated. Multiple attempts have been made. This time though, I think we have the setup correct.

This proofs represent the first attempt. They have gone back with changes, so it depends on how that goes. However, it’s a good first step towards the end goal.

I was walking home recently when I noticed the two Leeds Dock water taxis, ee & Drie, tied up by the side of the canal. It gave me pause to think about the success of them.

Judging that depends on what you thought their purpose is/was. This in itself isn’t clear because I do not know whether the have been scrapped permanently, or whether they are just talking a very long holiday. As things stand though, they do not seem to have been running for over a month.

The new owners of Leeds Dock, Allied London (not a name that would endear yourself to Northerns), made a big slash about them. Pun intended of course. They put together videos of all the ways you could get from the city centre to the dock, including taking the water taxi.

Nobody did though. Unless you had guests visiting from Finland. This is not at all surprising. It is not any faster than walking. You would have to get to the station, then wait for the boat, then take a slow cruise down the canal.

This was not the fatal flaw though. The problem is inconsistently. They often didn’t run. How would you know if they were running or not? That is unclear. Certainly unclear enough that you wouldn’t make plans around them running. On one occasion I walked in the office to find an email telling me they were not running today. A bit late. People are put off by buses because they are sometimes late. But they run every day, to a timetable, and have done for decades. There is no such faith to be had in the water taxis.

Secondly, and here is the hilarious part, they don’t run when it is too wet. When there is ‘appalling weather’ such as a lot of rain (not flooding, which is perhaps more understandable – though it is a boat!) they stop running. Surely that is the one time you would want to use them in an attempt to stay dry?

I hedged at the start of this post by asking about the intent. It could be that the water taxis are designed as a promotional item. An attempt to provide the dock with some glamour and convince companies to move down there. If so, it has been successful. Sky are now down there with other companies likely to follow.

However, as a method of transportation, if it hasn’t already been scrapped, it seems only a matter of time. The only way I think they are likely to be a success is if at very least they run every day, come rain, come shine. With an emphasis on the rain, that does come most days.

We saw another good turnout for the January meeting of West Yorkshire Humanists. We initially put out only a dozen or so chairs in a circle. However, we soon had to add more, making for a large and very misshapen circle. Always a good thing of course!

This month was debate night and we discussed a number of issues. The headline debate was ‘can terrorism ever be justified?’ The arguments are complex and myriad once you get into it.

After the meeting we went to The George for a few drinks.

They had alcohol-free cocktails for £2.95. I am not sure anyone had ever ordered them before was there was a lot of confusion about how to make them. However, they tasted good, and we ended up getting a second round.

Following on from my photos of Leeds flooding I have been back out to take some new photos. I was hoping to stitch them together into one photo. However, I was unable to get them matched up, and the colour of the sky is also very different, so it did not look very good. Therefore I have just put them side by side.

One of the roads near us was deep underwater as a result of the recent Leeds flooding so it was coned off. However, one man decided that he was going to drive down he road anyway. Unfortunately, he was not careful enough and managed to hit a cone, wedging it inside his front wheel. He then had to get out of the car and take it out.

See the video:

What this doesn’t show is that he got half way down the road, realised it was too deep, and had to turn round and come back.

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To end the year West Yorkshire Humanists held a social at the Lawnswood Arms.

Following on from my previous post looking at statistics we can pull out from the Leeds Restaurant Guide dataset, I wanted to look at how the restaurant scene has changed since we first published the guide.

Here it is:

In this graph, I have plotted each cuisine type against the number of restaurants. This is shown for the 1st edition (2013), 3rd edition (2014) and 5th edition (2015). As we learned in the last post, the number of restaurants has risen, so in general, we would expect most categories to have grown between each addition. I have not included pub grub as the size of it makes the rest of the data difficult to see.

For the most part, this holds true. Some cuisines have grown faster than others though. We have seen a rise in restaurants serving American, British, International (those that serve food from all over the world with no real speciality) and steak.

In other areas we have seen a decline though. Buffet, French, Indian and seafood have all seen a decline. Persian has too, but this was always a small market. The biggest change is possibly Chinese restaurants. In the first edition we had seven Chinese restaurants, now we have only four.

In terms of the most popular cuisines, Italian remains king. When we first wrote the guide we even considered splitting Italian into two categories, one for general Italian and one for restaurants that specifically did pizza. Latin is also very popular thanks to the growth of tapas bars. It used to be equally as popular as Indian, but Indian has since fallen away.

We can draw the most popular cuisines in a table. I have omitted hotels and casinos, and international because these do not really tell us anything about people’s tastes.

It is a pretty consistent story. The only change is that Indian has dropped off from a joint-second spot in 2013 to now being 5th, behind British and American. Much of the growth in these categories is down to meat places such as burgers and BBQ so it could be people are looking towards more meat-heavily dishes in recent years. Or it could also just be random chance. The sample size is not that big after all.