The Equinox Restaurant prides itself on using the freshest possible ingredients with a focus on an in-season menu. We are proud to use local produce, like Margaret River Venison Chorizo, Augusta Bakery and all our wines are from the local Margaret River Wine Region and the Geographe Wine Region. By dining at The Equinox you are not only supporting The Equinox you are supporting local producers.
Situated at the gateway to Your Margaret River Region on the breathtaking north facing Geographe Bay overlooking the historical Busselton Jetty, the setting is one that you won’t be rushing away from, under the heritage fig trees and overlooking the tranquil waters. After our major renovation in 2015 you can dine alfresco under the fig trees or inside soaking up the 180 degrees of Geographe Bay and the Busselton Jetty, the perfect spot to people watch, dine overlooking the amazing sunsets or enjoy one of our famous cocktails.
A beautiful spot for catching up with friends, family and loved ones over breakfast, lunch, dinner or any time in between. With extensive menus or group set menus and even a children’s menu which comes with a Nippers bag to keep them entertained, there is a dish to suit all tastes. Where locals like to eat and visitors find a warm welcome.
Our Restaurant has full table service, so find yourself a nice spot and let The Equinox team spoil you, if you have any dietary requirements, including Gluten Free, Vegetarian, Vegan please let our friendly team know. We have a constantly changing specials menu and pride ourselves on delivering contemporary multi cuisine dishes.
If you are planning on a day out, then why not pre order one of our made to order picnics you just pick up and are set for the day. Or if you are booked on one of the many fabulous tours, then we also have a full takeaway menu available.
Being at the gateway to The Margaret River Region, spoilt for choice with some amazing wines that we are grateful to have on our doorstep. We have a wide selection on our menu, to try and if you like one in particular, it’s just a short hop to the winery to buy some to take home.
If you grew up watching (and obsessing over) Disney Channel stars like I did, your world was probably rocked in 2013 when Joe Jonas' Vulture essay went live. His tell-all basically blew the roof off of the Disney fame factory and the restrictions it placed on his life when the Jonas Brothers were still a thing. And he also ended up calling out ex-girlfriend and close friend Demi Lovato and Miley Cyrus for pressuring him into smoking weed for the first time. So unsurprisingly, in honor of the pot-smoking holiday that is 4/20, Demi Lovato posted an Instagram tribute to the first time Jonas smoked, and it's actually super hilarious. To be fair, if Jonas is going to call her out like that, he totally had this one coming, even though it does seem that it's all in good fun.
And if the photo is a testament to Lovato's editing skills, I'm pretty impressed. In fact, I don't know what I love more about this picture — the fact that a very young Cyrus and Lovato are hugging with artfully drawn halos over their heads in the background, or Jonas' red-eyed, open-mouthed perfect smoking face Photoshopped on Selena Gomez's body with the oversized joint near his mouth. Or maybe it's the Mickey Mouse-shaped psychedelic peace signs decorating the border of the photo. I just can't decide.
To fully get the beauty of this photo, you have to understand what Jonas said in his Vulture piece on the topic:
Teenage peer pressure at its finest, folks. And now that Lovato has taken the first swing, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Jonas is going to respond. And in my mind, he has a few options.
I feel like this could be the start of a beautiful Photoshop war that the entire world gets to watch and marvel over. Certainly he has some embarrassing dirt on Lovato he could spill by way of a ridiculous Instagram upload of his own? I'll be over here, anxiously refreshing his account.
I realize there wasn't Instagram back then, but certainly someone commemorated the moment on that fateful day. I want to see it!
Even though Jonas' last essay was pretty comprehensive, I'm not about to turn down another opportunity to hear more secrets from inside the Disney machine. If it was up to me, every Disney star would be required to do an exit interview after their contract expires.
Being that Cyrus is already celebrating 4/20, Lovato and Jonas could easily get in on the party. Pics, please!
Mai Khoi may be pint-sized, but her lungs are Herculean. Perched on a makeshift stage inside a crumbling house in Hanoi, the 33-year-old pop star — who has millions of devout fans worldwide, has been dubbed “Vietnam’s Lady Gaga” due to her pink hair, in-your-face lyrics, and involvement with political activism, including meeting with then President Obama to discuss Vietnam's human rights problems. Chest heaving, nostrils flaring, guitar pounding, she sings a song that is as far as can be from the ooey-gooey, Splenda-sweet pop that Vietnam’s airwaves are known for. Here, in the land of state-approved singers, this gritty guitarist marches to a far more raucous beat.
“She’s got that 80’s Madonna swagger, self-secure woman, 'I know who I am' vibe,” says Mark Tarsia, a Grammy Award-winning producer who’s collaborated with Khoi in the past.
Today's concert is held in an abandoned building, and the vibe is very hush-hush. While Khoi's shows sell out from Sydney to Berlin, she's an outcast at home, banned from performing in her native Vietnam.
Still, the blacklisted Khoi is determined to raise a ruckus — flouting the law with invite-only underground concerts in dingy, pop-up studios. During a breathless break between sets, Khoi's booming voice wanes to a whisper. “Unlike other musicians here, we don’t ask for permission,” she tells Bustle. “We give voice to the unspeakable.”
But her bold performance isn’t going undetected. Outside, a plainclothes police officer lurks in the dark, just a few paces away.
When the show ends, Khoi is guzzling down a piping-hot bowl of post-concert bún riêu soup at a nearby noodle joint, despite the fact that it is 100 degrees out and the streets of Hanoi feel like a sauna. Seated across from her, I take in her electric pink lipstick and waist-length hair. She doesn’t look much like an A-list celeb — or a "wanted woman," for that matter — but then again, what does a "wanted woman" really look like?
This pop star is on a dangerous, dissident mission, which she lays out to me from the get-go. “[I want] to be free to say what I want, sing what I want, wear what I want, go where I want and not having someone looking over me and saying, you can't do that,” she says. These are all uncontroversial, garden-variety goals in democratic countries, like the U.S. or France; but in communist Vietnam, there’s nothing routine about them.
She darts her eyes left and right, and then leans in so close I can smell the broth on her breath. She slips me a few lyrics from her upcoming eighth album, Cuffed In Freedom, cautiously, like she’s telling an intimate secret. Her music has always been controversial — she had a hit in 2014 called “Selfie Orgasm" — but not as politically incendiary as new songs like "Re-education Camp" or "What We Want." As she quietly croons to me the forbidden verses — "Scream after scream in the streets / Green uniforms arresting people / Blood flows in front of me / My heart shrivels in pain " — I realize I’m witnessing, in real time, Khoi's ongoing transformation of a pretty pop star to a rogue activist.
Khoi spent her childhood years in Vietnam’s sleepy Cam Ranh Bay, where as a tween, she learned to play the keyboard alongside her father, a mild-mannered music teacher. After singing in teahouses and bars to make ends meet, she released her first album in 2004 with little fanfare. Then, in the 2010s, Khoi broke out onto the international pop circuit with edgy songs like 2014's "Saigon Boom Boom," which unabashedly broached taboo topics like love and promiscuity. In Vietnam's traditional culture, such frankness is a big, fat no-no. But her fans — found among the modern millennials who make up nearly 70 percent of the country's population — disagreed. She even won Vietnam Television’s Album of the Year Award in 2010.
But by 2016, Khoi reached a turning point. Though her work had not yet become political, the government began to shut down her shows due to her stage presence and sexually frank lyrics, which they did not approve. At this point, those risqué pop hits and catchy, K-Pop-inspired beats started fading to the background in favor of more American blues-laced music that focused on corruption, gender inequality and of course, "The Man," who clamped down on her artistic expression. Her earlier work was provocative, sure, but once her countercultural lyrics started touching politics — Vietnam's third rail — Khoi entered the underground.
Celebrity activists who attend protests or make red carpet declarations about their cause are a dime a dozen, but even the U.S. trend towards celebrity activism is only a recent phenomenon, says Jeetendr Sehdev, USC’s resident pop culture expert. In the past, a handful of ground-breaking U.S. stars took political stands — for instance, musician and actor Harry Belafonte was involved in the Civil Rights movement from the 1950s onward, and numerous Communist actors, writers and directors were blacklisted from working in Hollywood in the '40s and '50s during the McCarthy hearings. Today, taking up a cause or creating a new charity is a way to generate “a level of authenticity" with fans, Sehdev tells me over the phone. But Khoi's activism is a throwback to an earlier age, when being honest and outspoken about one's politics would ruin someone professionally. In an age where droves of celebrities in the U.S. and other democratic nations find that activism helps bolster their careers, Khoi's activism is sacrificing hers.
Over the past year, she’s been making the rounds at human rights forums and conferences around the world, most recently at the 2017 Global Media Forum in Germany. She's also rubbed elbows with the likes of Google’s Eric Schmidt and President Obama, making an impassioned plea for freedom of speech and artistic expression within authoritarian regimes. "Most activism happens online because it's the only space where you can speak freely," says Khoi. "Now [that] people have a taste of freedom, they are going to want more."
And last year, as election fever ran high in Vietnam, Khoi even traded the concert stage for the political podium, running for a coveted seat in Vietnam’s National Assembly, the supreme organ of state power, to be, as she puts it, “the voice of [the] youth.” Khoi says she considered the move “the responsibility of the famous," but also one of bigger ambitions: "to raise awareness about democracy and show people that political participation was possible." With her pop star status, Khoi's campaign spread like wildfire across social media. "I was also quietly confident that if I made it to the ballot, I would be elected... [but still] skeptical about the fairness of the electoral process," she says — and rightfully so.
In most countries, your chance of success as an upstart independent candidate is already slim. But in one-party Vietnam, simply running can be treacherous, says Thu-Huong Nguyen-Vo, a professor of Vietnamese politics at UCLA. Legally, anyone over 21 years old can take part in the country’s legislative elections which, since 2002, have allowed independent candidates. But in practice, those who do risk rejection, retribution, and being named a dissident — all for challenging the Communist Party. And in the decade and a half since independent candidates have been permitted, only seven have won any of the hundreds of seats in the National Assembly — and all seven of those candidates were party members. For all these reasons, the young and radical Khoi was doomed, long before her political campaign truly began.
Shortly after her political stunt, state censors disabled Khoi's social media accounts and pulled all her songs from the radio and TV as punishment. Since May 2016, Khoi has fallen from the glamour of pop star life and out of favor with Vietnam's government. She even claimed that her landlord pressured her to move out of her building at the behest of the police, though he didn’t respond to requests for comment. Even worse, Khoi claims she's also under constant surveillance — not officially under house arrest, but still closely monitored by the authorities. Her music career is stalled, since all Vietnamese singers must legally submit their lyrics and get approval for any performance or major media appearance from Vietnam’s Ministry of Culture, which didn’t respond to Bustle’s requests for comment. Cuffed In Freedom, her first political album, is her pièce de résistance — or her revenge — and will be independently released this year. But not in Vietnam.
Khoi faces an uphill battle. In recent years, this tiny Southeast Asian nation has jailed numerous activists and bloggers, rivaling neighboring China and Iran. Official stats are hard to come by, but nearly 100 people have been put behind bars, according to Amnesty International. Those who question government policies, expose official corruption or call for democratic alternatives to one-party rule risk an array of less-than-savory options: police harassment, detainment, surveillance and “kangaroo court” trials with no access to legal counsel, says Phil Robertson, Human Rights Watch’s Deputy Director in Asia. The latest example of this came in July, when a prolific blogger, Tran Thi Nga, was handed a nine-year sentence in prison after a one-day trial. Her crime: posting about political corruption and environmental abuse online.
Lately, “the Vietnamese government [has been] diversifying its approach to dissidents and activists," says Robertson — he says, dispatching ruthless, anonymous men to attack them. According to a 2017 report from the Human Rights Watch, these men wear civilian clothes, but brandish iron rods, belts and sticks to harass human rights campaigners, lawyers, activists and outspoken bloggers. It doesn’t matter who’s watching either — in the last two years, 36 documented cases of these attacks took place on crowded buses, in quiet cafés and in broad daylight.
Back at the concert, dozens of fans, friends and family pack into the second floor of a damp building on the outskirts of Hanoi, not far from Vietnam’s political nucleus. Instead of the usual vocal warmups, Khoi sucks down a cigarette before the concert to get in the zone. The pre-concert ritual works: on stage, she’s thrashing and tense. The sounds of bamboo flutes, harps and drums — a nod to Vietnam’s musical traditions — meld with wild guitar synths.
A sea of army green surrounds the stage as 40 local gun-toting police officers storm the venue. Khoi gets off with a hefty fine this time, imposed by the municipal People’s Committee, which did not respond to Bustle's requests for comment.
Even in the face of obstacles, Khoi's voice will only continue to grow louder. "Show what you think, say what you see," she says "And that is the first step towards liberation, freedom for yourself."
Even though Hurricane Irma has pummeled Antigua and Barbuda, there are hardly any photographs yet, given that those on the islands are hunkered down, and the worst of the storm arrived in the dead of night. But if you're looking for images to help you better understand the sheer magnitude of the storm, NASA has released a video to help you out. This video of Hurricane Irma from space is a big warning sign of the sheer force that could hit Florida later in the week.
The video is satellite footage shared by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The satellites over the Atlantic give you a visual clue of just how serious the Category 5 storm is. The eye is clearly defined in the video, with sustained winds circling it at speeds up to 185 miles per hour. That makes Irma the strongest Atlantic Ocean hurricane ever.
That became abundantly clear in Barbuda early Wednesday morning when wind speeds were so fast that they broke off the island's weather station's anemometer, the tool that measures wind speeds. After gusts of 155 miles per hour, the station started registering as calm, or no winds, but it was actually that there was no signal registering.
To move beyond a photo, the description of Category 5 hurricane, a storm with catastrophic damage, is very telling:
Puerto Rico is already preparing for that possibility. It's been more than a 100 years since a Category 5 storm hit the island. The New York Times reported that many stores on the island are sold out of emergency preparation items like water, plywood, and batteries. Plus Puerto Rican Gov. Ricardo Rosselló said that issues with electricity could take days, weeks, or even months in some areas to resolve — exactly what the National Hurricane Center predicted.
Further north in South Florida, emergency precautions are well underway as well. The Florida Keys are under a mandatory evacuation order, and schools are closed as of Wednesday to pressure people into leaving the low lying areas that are particularly vulnerable to a storm surge. The same reasoning motivated the Bahamas to move residents off the southernmost islands to the capital city.
These images from space may be the only visuals to date, but there are likely to be many dramatic videos to come.
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