Food festival winners announced

Food festival winners announced

JAKARTA (JP): Eat well and get a roundtrip First Class Jakarta-Hong Kong plane ticket, free accommodation at Shangri-La Hong Kong and a dining voucher or Rp 500,000 (US$235.84) at Jakarta's Oasis restaurant. Iwan Susilo, a holder of an American Express (Amex) card since 1987, won all of those things by simply filling in a form at the restaurant, which was a participant in 1994's Jakarta Food Festival.

Hermawan Tanzil and Frans A.M. Nijnens, also Amex card holders, won the second and the third prizes. The festival was held from September until October last year.

The festival, organized by the City Tourism Office, the Indonesian Tourism Promotion Board and Amex Travel Related Services and participated in by 39 restaurants, aimed to improve service in Jakarta's restaurants in order to make the city more competitive as a place for doing business.

Patrons of restaurants participating in the festival, which will is to be an annual event, were asked to fill in a form, stating their opinion about the restaurants. The form was used in the three prizes lucky draw. Based on customers' choice, the Oasis, Forum Shark's Fin and Singapore Ping restaurants were declared the winners of the festival.

"To increase food quality and services in restaurants is very important now if we want to develop our tourism industry," said Roy Tan Hardy, Amex Travel Related Services's director of marketing and sales. He was speaking at the prize presentation ceremony yesterday.

"A survey carried by Australian-based consultant Frank Small and Associates, in Jakarta and Bali last November, recorded that more than half of foreign visitors rated the food in Jakarta as 'good to excellent', while one out of four visitors mentioned good food and entertainment as the most memorable about Indonesia," Roy said. (als)