The Rules Have Changed.
Australian hospitality is full of good people working hard inside systems that have quietly become more fragile. Food Game Media exists to name what changed, explain why effort alone stopped working, and help the industry redesign the game so it's actually winnable again.
Sixteen years reading spreadsheets. Ten years reading kitchens.
Julian Blok spent sixteen years in investment banking — across Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Bankers Trust, and Citibank — doing what banking teaches you to do: find the pattern underneath the noise. Strip out the narrative. Ask what's actually driving the number.
Then in 2014, he did what any sensible person would do at the peak of a banking career: he left it all to run a hospitality supplies warehouse.
Over the next decade, he grew that business from $500K to $5M — building commercial kitchens, supplying national brands, and having a front-row seat to thousands of hospitality operations at every level. Not from the dining room. From the loading dock, the walk-in, the service call at 11pm on a Friday.
That vantage point — banker's brain, supplier's eyes — is what makes Food Game Media different. Most industry commentary comes from chefs, operators, or journalists. This comes from someone who spent a decade watching the same failure modes repeat across venues of every size, concept, and ambition — and couldn't stop asking why.
The answer, it turns out, isn't that people don't care enough. It's that hospitality asks care to compensate for systems that were never designed for the pressure they're now under. That's not a motivation problem. It's a design problem.
Four ways to see the game clearly.
Every arm of Food Game Media serves the same purpose: making the invisible machinery of Australian hospitality visible — so the people inside it can stop running on adrenaline and start running on design.
Advisory & Consulting
Here's what most consultants won't tell you: your venue probably doesn't have a strategy problem. It has a systems problem wearing a strategy costume. We work with independent operators, multi-site groups, and the broader hospitality ecosystem on the structural issues that effort alone can't fix — margin leakage, operational fragility, cognitive overload, and the invisible costs that show up as Tuesday chaos.
No motivational speeches. No laminated frameworks. Just a clear-eyed look at the machine you're actually running — and how to redesign it so normal people, on normal days, produce consistently good outcomes. Based in Sydney. National reach.
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Food Game Weekly Wrap
Every Friday, one email that cuts through the noise of Australian hospitality. FGWW is the analytical briefing for people who are too busy running a venue to read everything — but too invested in the game to miss what matters. Industry news, data, behavioural patterns, and the occasional uncomfortable truth, delivered without fluff, motivational padding, or sponsored content.
Written through the supplier's lens. Which means you get the perspective that most industry media misses entirely: the view from behind the scenes, where the real patterns live.
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The Food Game Podcast
Candid, story-led conversations with the people who actually know where the bodies are buried in Australian hospitality. Operators, executives, suppliers, chefs, lawyers, accountants, landlords — the full ecosystem. Not a "tips" show. Not a highlight reel. The stories, pressure points, and invisible work that the industry rarely says out loud.
Warm, funny, and occasionally absurd — because hospitality often is. But the purpose is serious: clarity without shame. YouTube-led, with audio on all major platforms.
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The Food Game
Why Hospitality Sucks — and How We Can Fix It. The book that names what every operator has felt but couldn't quite articulate: the game changed, and nobody updated the rulebook. A behavioural, systems-led explanation of why being busy stopped meaning being safe — and what the industry can do about it.
Not a manual. Not a pep talk. A calm, sharp, occasionally funny account of the game as it's actually played — written for the people who play it.
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Hospitality didn't break. It wore down. Quietly. Gradually. Plausibly.
Then COVID came along and removed the last layer of padding that was stopping everyone from feeling it properly. Before that, the industry survived on a series of unspoken buffers — softer enforcement, easier labour, forgiving customers, flexible landlords. That world doesn't exist anymore. But the industry still behaves as if it does.
The Food Game argues that the pain isn't a motivation problem. It's a design problem. The book moves from what changed, to where the pressure actually comes from, to how humans behave under it, to why "calm" is the rarest and most valuable outcome a venue can produce.
The reader experience is designed to feel like: "This is what I've been feeling, but couldn't name."
The stories that reveal the actual rules.
Everyone in hospitality has a story where one small thing — a sick dishwasher, a late delivery, a surprise inspection — cascaded into a week of pain. Those aren't anecdotes. They're data. And they reveal the rules of the game more honestly than any industry report.
The Food Game Podcast captures those stories from across the ecosystem: operators, executives, suppliers, chefs, landlords, lawyers, accountants — anyone who touches the machinery of a venue. It's warm, candid, and occasionally absurd. Because hospitality is all three.