It’s a real pleasure and honour to write this first F&B blog. The past four months have been a truly thrilling experience for me and it has been a pleasure to meet some of you already. The year ahead looks indeed exciting while thinking of all the upcoming F&B promotions coming soon. My main focus is to bring to your table the best chefs and winemakers that the world has to offer. At The Deck we’re aiming to bring on a bimonthly basis guest chefs from Shangri-La hotels all around the world. After the well-received Penang Festival in January, we will have the pleasure of welcoming guest chefs from the Shangri-La Hotel Baotou for a Mongolian food festival, while in May Middle Eastern spices and flavours will be introduced by the Shangri-La Hotel Abu Dhabi team of talented chefs. In the meantime The Dining Room will keep hosting unique wine dinners with some of the finest winemakers of Bordeaux and other renowned wine regions on a monthly basis. We will also continue our quest to find some of the greatest chefs in the world to delight you with their dishes for special evenings in The Dining Room.

It has been a very busy start to 2010 for me. The Club will be busy again this year upgrading and adding facilities. I have many projects to keep me busy during the first couple of months of this year and have several more to come.

In January we opened Comfyland on the 3rd Floor in the Play Patch section of the Adventure Zone. It is an exciting addition to the area that is both fun and educational for the kids. I recommend you take a look if you have children between the ages of one and five years old.

On February 1 we re-opened our rooftop tennis courts after a six-week renovation. We have resurfaced the courts with a surface called Plexipave. This is the surface they have just played on at the first tennis Grand Slam event of 2010 – the Australian Open. The feedback from Club tennis players, and the professionals who played in Melbourne, is that it is a great surface to play on.

We have just started a two-month renovation of the Salon on the fifth floor. We have gutted the existing site and will re-open the new salon on Saturday, April 17. The renovation will include the Hair Salon and the Beauty Rooms. We have been working with a young designer who has come up with a great design for the area. A new addition will be a separate area for children’s haircuts.

Watch this space for more exciting updates on Sports & Recreation!