To Our Bella Lavender Family,

With Mario recently turning 70 and Lucy not far behind, we would like to step back and enjoy our long-awaited retirement, therefore, sadly we have decided to close our cafe at Bella Lavender Estate at the end of June this year.

David will not be able to take over Bella Lavender Estate because he will need to be home for his children now that Nicola has recently embarked on a new career which requires her to be in Adelaide and away from their children for a great deal of the year.

Once the restrictions are lifted and we get back to “normal”, we will continue to open for large bookings (birthdays, engagement, reunions, wakes, weddings, Christmas parties etc.) and bus groups however we will not be trading through the cafe to the general public on an ongoing basis.

Mario will continue to have his coffee van at various venues throughout the Riverland so look out for him.

Our body products will still be available online when you visit our website www.bellalavender.com.au or just give us a call.

Over the years the lavender farm has given us the opportunity to meet so many wonderful people both local and from afar, including our great staff. How fortunate we have been to be able to employ so many young people who commenced work with us during their high school years. We have been able to watch them grow from young teenagers into young adults and move on to further studies or full-time work either in the region or further afield. Some of these beautiful young people who were employed with us when we first opened Bella Lavender eleven and a half years ago are now married and have children of their own (where has the time gone?). Thank you so much to every staff member, young and “older”, who has worked at Bella Lavender over the years for all your hard work, smiles and support.

We know that everyone who has worked at Bella Lavender has tried their best to give good service to our customers at all times and thank you to so many people who have acknowledged this. However, we are aware there are a couple at times we “may” have got it wrong so here are a few bloopers that at the time made us positively cringe but now we can smile and put it down to experience.

Bloopers!
We had an interstate bus group in for a three course dinner and for desert decided that they would enjoy homemade apple crumble. When the customers started eating the desert it tasted rather salty. Oh dear, how embarrassing. Lucy had mistaken the caster sugar for salt and used the salt to make the crumble. She claims that the salt and caster sugar containers were very similar but really, how hard is it to read the word “sugar” that was so clearly plastered all over the lid?. What is worse - this happened more than once, the second time to a Cambodian delegation who were too polite to complain about it!!!!!!!

It may also be possible that a customer could have been given the wrong takeaway pizza or an empty pizza box, (more than once!...detecting a trend yet?) Oh dear!

And if you are a regular at Bella Lavender or if you were ever served by Mario then there is a good chance that we may also have gotten your coffee order incorrect occasionally!

There have been moments when our customers were (hopefully) blissfully unaware of the chaos in the kitchen and our staff would laugh and compare ourselves to a hilarious scene from Faulty Towers.

We can honestly say there are many more great moments than bloopers and those happy moments happened because of you, our customers. Thank you for supporting us over the years and for sharing your stories, smiles and heartaches with us.

For us, this is a very difficult decision and is an equally sad moment for our families and staff, who are like family (or are family), as it is for you, our beautiful customers who have been so loyal and encouraging to us over the past eleven and a half years.

Please come and see us in the coming 6 weeks before we close our doors and share a story and a smile. We would love to see you.

Again thank you all so much

Mario, Lucy & David

Liquid error (templates/article line 27): Could not find asset snippets/relatedblogs.liquid

← Previous Post