Adam Faigen, restaurateur

10/14/21 • 43 min

Anyone who has worked in hospitality will tell you running a restaurant or cafe is a tough gig. Margins are small, customers are fickle and competition is fierce. Add a pandemic into the mix – including mandated closures – and it's proved near impossible for many restaurateurs.
Adam Faigen knows this better than most. For the past two decades, Adam has owned and operated several cafes and 'smart casual' restaurants in Melbourne's inner south. He's seen food trends come and go as well as the rise of food delivery giants Uber Eats and Deliveroo. But nothing could prepare him for what was to come in 2020. Undeterred, Adam and his business partner started up a new business venture: Golda, a restaurant celebrating modern Israeli food.
The restaurant, originally inspired by the cooking of his late maternal and paternal grandmothers – Sephardi and Ashkenazi respectively – quickly won admirers for its unique fusion of flavours. As Melbourne re-awakens to life after lockdowns, Adam is hoping Golda can return to its early success and help kickstart a revival in the city's dining scene.

Previous Episode

Josh Kay, television researcher/producer

For more than two decades, Channel 7's sports broadcasters and presenters have come to rely on the knowledge of one producer: Josh Kay. Every weekend during the AFL football season – and every four years for the Olympics – Kay serves up pages of research to help shape compelling and entertaining television coverage. Not suprisingly, Kay is a walking stats machine, capable of listing off obscure sporting facts and figures from the past to present day. It's as if the job of sports producer/research was made for him – and yet life very nearly took him down a different path.

Next Episode

Brae Sokolski, racehorse owner

What runs through the heart and mind of the owner of a runner in the Melbourne Cup?

Brae Sokolski, the owner of race favourite Incentivise, walks Ashley Browne through what his lead-up to the 2021 Melbourne Cup race is likely to be. (Note: this interview was recorded prior to the Cup).

“I’m actually fairly even-tempered (until) probably an hour before the race and then the nerves start to hit,” he said.

“When the horses are in the mounting yard 15 minutes before the jump that’s when I really start to struggle and when they’re milling behind the barriers, I’ve basically lost my faculties and its even difficult to watch the race.

“The nerves accelerate pretty quickly and I keep a lid on it as best I can but it’s constantly on my mind. Work is a welcome distraction but I’m constantly running the race through my mind over and over and over again.”

Winner of the Caulfield Cup a fortnight ago, Incentivise, at around $2, will likely be the shortest priced favourite since Phar Lap in 1930. If Sokolski is looking for an omen, Phar Lap’s owner, David Davis, was also Jewish and it is believed there have been no Jews to have won a Melbourne Cup since.

Sokolski, who made his fortune in commercial real estate investment, told the podcast of first being bitten by the racing bug when he laid a few bets, while trying to take his mind off his VCE exams.

He began racing horses a few years later but it is only in the last decade that he has become one of Australia’s leading – and most successful - owners.

In a wide-ranging discussion, Sokolski also discusses:

The difference between succeeding in business and racing.
How involved he gets in the tactical side of the sport.
The joy he gets from racehorse ownership and the hot streak he is currently experiencing, which he knows is unsustainable.
The important steps Racing Victoria has taken to make the sport safer for its horses, especially on Cup day.
Some of the anti-Semitism he has experienced online since becoming successful in racing.
The hilarious story of Kaplumpich, the most Jewish racehorse ever and why the joy of owing a horse with his childhood friends might even top winning a Melbourne Cup.