Melbourne foodie, blogger, waitress and martini enthusiast Tresna Lee has launched Geisha2.0, a modern take on the Geisha concept, ushering tourists, business visitors and locals around Melbourne's best restaurants on a spontaneous adventure.
Tresna Lee explains that the Geisha2.0 concept came about spontaneously. "I was having a chat to my good friend Eddie Harran one day about how I'd taken some friends out on a restaurant crawl and what I loved about it," says Lee. "I was just saying, 'I wish i could do that all the time.' He said, 'You should make a business out of that.' I'd just been to work and I had all my hair tied up and I had a pen shoved in my hair and he said, 'It reminds me of the Japanese Geisha, you could be like a Geisha.'" The idea boiled down to Geisha2.0, a modern representation of the traditional Geisha. While Lee doesn't play instruments or dance, her version of the Geisha does provide custom-tailored hospitality.
Experiences can be booked for individuals or groups, and a popular offering is a school night adventure where individuals join a group of people they don't know. "I do these tours where I get three or four randoms to book a ticket and they might book it with a friend or they might just come on their own," says Lee. "They spend five hours guided by me through the city and they meet a few other people on that night and have this great experience. My job is to facilitate the evening and guide people through the city based on what they want to try. There's no set agenda, we don't have reservations, we don't have bookings, The venue is emailed to them 24 hours before - I say meet on this corner or meet in this alleyway and off we go. The first drink we spend just 10 minutes talking about what kind of restaurants we're all into what we like to eat, what we don't like to eat, what we'd like to try and haven't tried before, restaurants we've been to that we really like and why we like them - so I get an idea of what the group's into. At the back of my mind I'm forming a bit of an itinerary, which can change at the drop of a hat. We might be walking towards one venue and someone makes a comment about oysters, and someone else says, 'oh I love oysters,' and someone else says, 'I really want to try some.' I go right, that's it, let's all get in this cab and we're going on the other side of the city and we're going to smash out a couple of dozen oysters, so it evolves that way."
Lee can also plan a one on one tour for people visiting Melbourne on business or who just wish for their tastes to be catered to exclusively. The first official Geisha experience was one-on-one. “He was here for five weeks and I took him out at least once a week whilst he was here. His wife came to town for one of those weeks and I took both of them out. He now has been able to come back and take people for business meetings and client meetings and say, ‘I'll meet you at Coda for a drink after work.’ When he's got weekends when he's not working he knows how to get to St Kilda and which cafes are available to him in St Kilda and Gertrude Street in Fitzroy - he's sort of become a local just through that experience. It's like a crash course in Melbourne eating and drinking.”
That’s my kind of education.