#featurestories

Form 3. I can’t believe I’m already halfway done with my secondary school life. It’s been a crazy journey and this year was no exception.

This past year was even more stressful considering the fact that I had to choose my electives. During the last week of school, our form was told that our elective results were going to be coming out on August 1st, and being completely honest, I dreaded that day. I kept thinking that I might not be good enough or my grades weren’t going to bring me the electives I wanted. I mean this was really important because I knew that these subjects would be what courses I could apply for when I’m going around to different universities, and not only that but it also meant my career in the future.

I honestly felt worthless and I couldn’t pick up the courage to tell myself that I would be fine and that I would get the electives that I wanted. With that I just waited. But then a few days before I got my results, I realized that I didn’t pray. The entire time I wasn’t devoted to asking God for help. Let alone asking him to just simply listen to my problems. And so I started praying that I would at least get electives that I could cope with. I did that every day until with day that I got the results. And praise God because I got the electives that I wanted. With this I know that I learnt a more valuable lesson: To never doubt regardless of whoever or whatever it is.

You have received a message:

“Your data usage has reached over 6GB this month (the monthly usage level per month). You may still continue to use our service however, your network access speed will be lowered to 128kbps.”

No… NO 3G?! How am I supposed to check Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Whatsapp and my e-mails?

Ugh… oh well, I guess I have to deal with it.

Over the past two weeks, I have been living under the prehistoric circumstances under which 3G does not exist. The experience was very unnerving at first - I was anxious to miss important messages or emails and annoyed that I can’t update my life through social media. 

After a while, I realised something funny - we’re constantly sharing our experiences, our feelings, our opinions on social media. Yet, how often to we genuinely get to experience each moment with God?

I resorted to reading books and writing in my journal during my long commutes. Firstly, books are great - fiction, philosophy, devotionals, etc. They fill your mind with new knowledge and enriches it. Secondly, writing is equivalent to reflecting on your thoughts with God. Writing allows me to retell the story of my day and to reflect on it simultaneously. 

In the past two weeks, I have been doing a lot of household chores to fill the gap of boredom. Through doing so, not only do I feel great because I helped my parents with daily work but also because I felt God working through me. Doing chores not out of “utos” (because I was told to do them so) has turned the task as an act of love.

Sometimes, we need to disconnect ourselves to fully experience God. As St. Teresa of Avila points out, detachment allows us the experience the freedom to love God above all, without caring about distracting and unduly things that take up our time.

Changing the world... because of Christmas

DAVID WILLIAMS has been drinking coffee in the Crave cafe in Kingsland for months. But only recently did he sit down with the two guys behind the operation, Nigel and Blue, to discover just how much of the cafe’s mission has to do with the Christmas story.

When Nigel Cottle uses the word ‘neighbourhood’ he has in mind an area that’s roughly equivalent to a one kilometre radius around the cafe he manages—Crave, in McDonald St, Kingsland.

He uses the word a lot. Sometimes it stands in for ‘community’, as in the neighbourhood of people that live within a geographical area bordered roughly by Great North, Morningside, St Lukes and Sandringham Rds. 

At other times though Nigel is speaking more of the global community, and the neighbourhood of poverty and suffering that exists in other countries.

Whatever the context though, the sense behind his use of the word is the same: the neighbourhood is the community of people to which you belong, those people who live beside you. In old-fashioned terms, the neighbourhood is Nigel’s mission field. It’s the place his heart goes when he most wants to live out his faith—which has a lot to do with a certain Christmas story, a baby who was born to bring ‘joy to the world’, and who would grow up to declare that we should all ‘love our neighbour as ourselves.’

You might say Nigel, and his partner in mission Blue Bradley, have taken those words literally.

Some six years ago they moved into the Kingsland area with a view to seeing how they could impact the neighbourhood by connecting with the people who lived and worked there, and by helping those ‘cool’ but somewhat disconnected people get to know one another.

They invested their money into two interconnected apartments, above where the current Crave cafe operates, and where their families still live. Meanwhile, downstairs, a failing cafe was stumbling towards inevitable closure. 

As Nigel says, there are so many reasons why a cafe shouldn’t work in that spot—and it eventually closed. Those reasons still exist—it’s a terrible location, has poor frontage, and minimal parking.

And yet, here’s Crave—several years on, still thriving, and to a huge degree fulfilling the mission they set out to achieve—operating as a hub for the local residential and business community; actively engaging in activities such as street parties and cooking classes to connect with their neighbours; and raising funds that get pumped back into the community—and not just here, but in places like India.

Nigel recalls a turning point, of sorts—their very first street party, which looked as if it would end up a massive fail.

‘Blue is a hunter, and he had a pig that he shot—and we were like, What do we do with that? And so, Oh well, let’s hire a spit, chuck it on, run a garage sale. Garage sales are a great way to get to know your neighbours. People come in and want to check through your stuff and you talk to them. And so we said, Come back tonight, we’ve got a pig on a spit.

‘At about five to six we put the spit on the road, we had some tables and chairs. But there was no-one here. One of the things moving in was that we’d like to have some epic failures, you know? Things that we try and they don’t succeed. So Blue and I reckoned this was going to be our first failure—it’s gonna be good.

‘And then literally, like a scene from a movie or something, everyone sort of came out of their houses and joined forces and walked around the corner—70 people just walked around, like a mob. And then within a couple of minutes of seeing that, the whole place is full of people and it was awesome. Just beautiful.’

In Nigel’s telling of the Crave history, once the cafe downstairs closed they were faced with a decision—would they get involved? With minimal experience, they decided to take it on, but had someone else operate the new business for two years. It was at that point they felt able to take it on themselves, and did so—extending the space to its current size, and by changing the ownership and governance structure of the cafe. The Crave Collective was formed, a group of 15 people who buy into the cafe with cash, and commitment—whatever they can manage—and who run it as a not-for-profit company, with Nigel as manager. 

All of Crave’s profits go back into the community—80 percent to local needs, and 20 percent to global projects. ‘Local’ projects are defined as those that are being run by people who live within the Crave neighbourhood. 

At the same time, a Christian ‘faith community’ sits alongside the Crave Collective. Nigel is wary of calling the community a ‘church’ or using language that sounds too much like traditional understandings of Christians and church. Both he and Blue are affiliated with the Baptist Church, but you don’t see signs of this affiliation in the cafe. And that’s how they want it. Once you get to know them though, the model of faith, hope and love by which they work is evident.

What sets this community apart from other, more traditional churches, is their focus on the neighbourhood—their mission of getting neighbours talking to neighbours. 

‘Because it’s a very transit community, people come and go all the time,’ says Nigel. ‘And so the level of engagement just shot up. It was amazing. I can’t really tell you why, I don’t know what happened—it just happened. And the people we’d been talking to, suddenly they engaged, and then they’d share. And it was awesome. And that was the start of going forward.

‘One of the things in terms of neighbourhoods is that if people are passing through, they’re renters not owners—and they won’t engage because they know they’re off soon. And so part of our job is working out how do we make people feel like they belong—even for a season, so they invest heavily while they’re here, and then they can invest heavily in the next place. 

‘And the good thing is there’s freshness and stuff—the bad thing is that people do go. So you’re engaging, investing, and it’s all good stuff—and then they move to the next place, but that’s good. 

‘One of our underlying things is how do we influence people for good. At our last street party, one of the guys came up to me and talked to me about how he’s so privileged to have spent this last season here with us. And he says, Look around, my kids will grow up remembering the days that we used to be part of this thing. And there’s a sense of like, yeah that’s cool because even if they move to the next bit, they take that with them.

‘The bonus for us is having been here six years, we’re now like pillars in the community, we’re the rocks. In another place it’d take you two generations to get to that same thing. So that’s the bonus of it, it hasn’t taken us that long to kind of engage.’

In October, Crave’s community involvement went to a new level, when several members of the collective, along with other young professionals, headed to India to explore how they might help Auckland-based charity Freeset in its work with Indian sex slaves.

Freeset’s objective is to set up so-called ‘freedom businesses’, businesses that disrupt the pre-existing economy based on kidnapping and sex slavery by giving women alternative employment opportunities.

Friends of Nigel are there to establish a business making hand-crafted leather bags which will be exported to NZ for sale. Freeset is working in both the red light districts and a local town which has been recognised as a source of trafficking. If they can disrupt the trade from its source, fewer women will be trafficked in the first place. It’s the ambulance at the foot of the cliff versus the railings at the top of the cliff model. 

‘They’re dealing with women that are just wrecked and unemployable because they’ve got all sorts of diseases, they’ve got no education, no skills and they’ve got serious post traumatic stress. They find sweeping the floor too hard sometimes.’

The trip gave the Crave Collective a close-up view not just of the issues local women face, but of the intrinsic corruption and bureaucratic and criminal systems that stand in their way.

‘It’s a different world—different social structure and system. We really got a sense of just how difficult it is, the tasks they’re up against. 

‘The idea is that they are trying to grow a bunch of small businesses that employ about 50 women because that seems to be what they can manage. And there’s two types of freedom—one is freedom from prostitution, and then there’s freedom from internal demons that come from that. The post traumatic stress and the emotional freedom is much harder to achieve than the physical freedom, in that sense—but if you can prevent it from the word go ... 

‘When we were up in one of the source districts, we read in the paper that the day before six 12-year-old girls had been abducted just off the street. And we just know that they will be down in the red light area in a short period of time. It was quite heart-breaking.’

Getting involved in the long-standing issues of a specific region in India would seem a far cry from the localised, neighbourhood mission of Crave. But for Nigel, they are complementary missions—and he points to the mission statement on the wall at Crave for context.

‘Basically, we want to fight poverty of any kind. And our main thing is that in this area here [Kingsland], social poverty is the main form of poverty. There are lots of great people that aren’t connected, so we want to help them to live in this neighbourhood that they exist in. 

‘Then we’ve got all the bro’town Morningside stuff that happens around us, and mental health stuff that happens around us. So we’re doing some Christmas meals, getting the neighbours on the wealthier side to help out the neighbours on the less wealthy side. And I think that will go really well. We’re putting some brown bags out next week for that. That’s all local.

‘But we’ve still got this thing with 20 percent of our money, which will go into global poverty stuff. We are aware that we are global citizens and we are targeting particularly sex trafficking as a core global issue right now. 

‘We’re trying not to just say, here’s 20 percent, to a big multi-national NGO, but we are asking how do we engage? We are basically saying we are going to put 10 years into this and then we’ll see. Because nothing happens in two, three years, you know. Everything takes longer.’ 

As Nigel says, whether the focus is on Morningside or in a specific region in India, the key is relationships. 

And on any given day of the week, that’s what you see forming in Crave—relationships that are changing the neighbourhood, and which might just change the world.

Auckland Grammar: where men are made MARK GARRISON goes on a tour of Auckland Grammar School and discovers more than dusty old secret rooms and names chalked on walls—he discovers a rich history and a proud tradition that has continued for more than 160 years.

Standing proudly on the lower slopes of Mt Eden, Auckland Grammar School is perhaps one of the most strikingly beautiful and architecturally distinctive buildings in the city, if not the country. The edifice of the school, however, is not the primary key to the institution’s lasting significance. Rather, it is the long list of students who have walked the hallways, studied in the classrooms and played sport on the fields who have made Auckland Grammar School the treasure it is today.

Edmund Hillary, Raoul Franklin, Peter Gluckman, Richard Chandler and Kenneth Keith are just a few of the long list of ‘Grammar Men’ who have gone on to achieve fame in science, business, sport and public service. The school doesn’t just teach students to read and write—it teaches them to become men. 

‘It is called being a Grammar man. Some boys are Grammar men and some aren’t. For some it is everything they ever wanted and for some it isn’t.’ This from Paul Paton, who taught English and Social Studies at the school for 20 years (1988-2008), and now serves as the archivist for the school. 

He remains incredibly proud of the school, its students and its history. 

‘I have always felt proud to say I have taught here. I like what it stands for,’ he says.

The school was established by Governor Grey in 1850 ‘for the welfare and educational advancement of persons of all classes and races who may inhabit the colony.’ The school was first housed in the old Immigration Barracks on Howe Street. In 1871, it was moved into the Albert Barracks on Princes Street and again to Symonds Street. Finally, the Crown gave the school 15 acres of prison land on its present site on Mountain Rd to erect a new building, and construction got underway in 1912. 

The end result was the stunningly beautiful main building built in a Spanish-Californian Mission style, which is still used today. Far from being a relic of the past, the main building feels akin to the hallowed halls of Cambridge. You can sense the history as you walk throughout the building. Everywhere you look you can see tributes to the boys who once walked these halls, burdened with stacks of books, driven by dedicated teachers to became forward thinkers in their own right.

No one respects the traditions and vital importance of the school more than Paul Paton. As we tour the campus together, Paul’s enthusiasm and love for the school becomes infectious. As we stand to reflect on the photos of the Masters who taught at the school for more than 25 years, Paul says, ‘It is a tribute to the school that people want to stay here for a long time.

‘It is the best, that’s why. It has tradition. It has high standards in sport, culture and academia. It offers all sorts of things to people. You can play sport if you want to. If you don’t want to you don’t have to. If you want to work hard and do well in exams you will. It is as simple as that really.’

As we continue our tour, we walk past a vast row of glass-fronted shelves filled with an array of cups and trophies. The silver and gold gleams in the cases and is an imposing display of the serious talent which has been nurtured within the hallowed halls.

‘All over the school were all these old cups and trophies; in cupboards, under stairs and in the attic. Headmaster [Tim] O’Connor’s idea was to get them all together on display, in a case and showcase the traditions of the school. Students walk by the case every day and they see boys like themselves are rewarded by having their name on the wall or on a shield or a cup.’

The staffroom is lined with faded pictures of former staff, imposing, rigid and formal. ‘They are all men, of course. They have all got moustaches. There is Mr Tibbs, a headmaster whose son was a champion swimmer and ironically drowned in the war.’ 

In a small room tucked away high up a narrow and steep staircase, just under the eaves, is a treasure trove of school memorabilia which Paul has lovingly and carefully rescued and collected from various sources. He carefully makes his way around the crammed room. Old school blazers line the walls and bookshelves are crammed with programmes and school publications dating back to the institution’s earliest days. Essentially, Paul has quietly compiled a museum-worthy collection, referencing back generations of students. 

‘At least they have come back to us rather than being chucked out. I have got them from op shops, you know. They have come back home. They turn up on TradeMe too.

‘I appointed myself archivist when I saw a lot of stuff being lost or thrown out. There is a blazer in the library which somebody brought into the office. They said we are going to take it to the tip, do you want it? Of course we want it. It is amazing what turns up still. We welcome anything, anything at all; ephemera, or anything to do with the school.’

At the end of the room is a door which leads out to the bottom of one of the school’s characteristic cupolas. 

‘This is the one I used to bring my form class up to on the last day of the year and let them write their names in chalk on the wall,’ Paul admits. The school didn’t mind this but then again Paul says he never asked anyone either. He reflects on the names as he slowly reads each one. 

‘Hamill; Gillies was a nice boy; Slade; Howlett.’ Peering high up towards the rafters he notices a name proudly scrawled. ‘Some orangutan has climbed right up there. Look! Imagine that! He risked his life to write his name on the wall.’ 

As our visit winds down I ask Paul how he feels about his time teaching at Auckland Grammar. 

‘I was very apprehensive to come here because this is the best school in Auckland and you have to be pretty good to get here. I had done well in my other school, so I was greatly honoured and thrilled to be teaching here. I have always been very proud to say I taught here.’ 

He looks wistfully at a photo of the school student body and faculty. 

Up Close and Dangerous MARK GARRISON sits down with restaurant rock star Tony Astle of Antoine’s, and discovers a man whose particular genius was honed in the face of estrangement and loss.

The term survivor has become a dreaded cliché, but there simply isn’t a better word to use when describing chef Tony Astle. In the notoriously cutthroat and demanding restaurant industry, Tony has remained at the top of his game, giving the new legion of Young Turks a run for their money. 

For 40 years Tony has manned the stove at his eponymous restaurant Antoine’s, in Parnell.  He has toiled all those years in the ‘same funny little kitchen that hasn’t changed much. It looks like a prison and it is a prison.’ 

Tony has mentored many of the city’s top chefs—he counts many of his regulars as friends, yet food critics misunderstand him, and he rarely ventures out. He is hardly an enigma however. Tony’s mouth is notorious.  He is a proud provocateur. Get him started on a topic, any topic, and watch the flames fly. He uses sharp words like butcher knives, quick and ruthless, cutting to the bone. His skills as a raconteur are as tightly-honed as his palate.

He is temperamental, talented and unapologetically stubborn. His dedication to his craft is matched by his fierce work ethic. However, like most chefs he doesn’t suffer fools gladly. What is apparent however, even to casual acquaintances, is that Tony is an original through-and-through. 

Growing up as a youngster in Christchurch the stove called out to him. Not necessarily as an artistic vessel, but rather because it simply made him popular. It was obvious even then that cooking was his forté. He was entrusted with cooking the sacred Sunday dinner and as a result got permission to duck out of Sunday school.  Traditionally it was the roast hogget which was prepared for Sunday dinners in New Zealand. 

‘Lamb was too expensive so it was hogget,’ Tony says. ‘It was very strong, smelly stuff. Our whole house reeked of lamb. In those days you put the roast on at 9 am and didn’t eat it until one, so it was really yuck.’ He was just eight years old.

Tony also loved to bake cakes, but not necessarily because he loved sweets. 

‘You were quite popular if you could bake cakes, and I liked being popular. It was very calculated.

‘I actually liked baking for some reason. I hate baking now but I enjoyed making cakes because it was easier to do those. We didn’t really eat anything but meat, sausages and stuff. New Zealanders really didn’t eat much; just meat which was boiled or stewed. You had your lamb on Sunday, on Monday you had it as shepherd’s pie—the bone was made into soup and the whole hogget lasted a week. We didn’t go to restaurants except Chinese restaurants for birthdays.’

Graham Kerr, famous as the Galloping Gourmet, proved to be a huge influence on the budding chef.  ‘I fell in love with the idea of being an entertainer more than a cook. Boys didn’t cook. Definitely boys did not cook. You didn’t do that sort of stuff. Especially my father; he couldn’t cope with it.’

Despite his father’s disapproval, or perhaps because of it, Tony began to investigate the Christchurch restaurant scene for an apprenticeship. 

‘There was no way I was going to be allowed university because my parents couldn’t afford it. My father came back from the war and had no job. He ended up working for the railway his whole life. They wanted me to do that sort of stuff. Go and work for the government because you could have a job for life. That would have lasted five minutes. My mother wanted me to be a Woolworth’s manager, and I went into a traineeship. That lasted two Saturdays because they caught me stealing the sweets and eating them.

‘There were two hotels in Christchurch and they were the only place you could do an apprenticeship. They were both upmarket hotels. I went to Warners Hotel for an interview. There was a seven-year apprenticeship and I thought “God, I’ll be old before I get out of there.” I couldn’t imagine seven years learning. We ate there, and it was the worst sausage I had ever eaten in my life. I thought, seven years to learn how to cook this! Nah, I can cook better than this already.

‘I went home and I wrote to Graham Kerr.  I told him I wanted to cook and asked him how I could become famous like him. Funnily enough I got a reply, saying, This is very unusual—a boy wanting to cook. He said, If you are that interested I can get you an interview at Le Normandie restaurant, which was in Wellington. I didn’t tell my parents I wrote, I just did it.”

Graham introduced Tony to Madame Louise, the owner of Le Normandie. 

‘It was the most upmarket thing I had ever seen. It had flock wallpaper, it had silver. It had men waiters. No one had ever seen a waiter before. They were all foreigners. Men didn’t wait tables in NZ in those days. It was little old ladies in white coats used to do the waiting.

‘Madame Louise was a big imposing woman. She was French and very famous at the time. Of course, she fell in love with a young boy from Christchurch. She thought I could be her son, and employed me as a waiter. As soon as I turned 15 I left home.’ 

Tony moved to Wellington and served tables while he attended cooking classes at Graham Kerr’s International Food School.

‘We didn’t tell my father until the day I was going,’ says Tony. ‘He wouldn’t have signed my leaving papers from school, so my mother had to do all that. The careers advisor at Shirley Boys High decided they didn’t want to have a boy from Shirley cooking. They just didn’t think it was a manly thing to do.

‘Madame Louise used to dress me up and every three months she would have to change my jacket because I was growing too quickly. I was very precocious. I used to make £5 a week and £20 a week in tips because I used to tell everyone I was an orphan—and they used to give me money because they felt sorry for me.’ 

While he enjoyed the experience of waiting tables, he discovered he did not have much of an aptitude for the technical demands of French silver service. 

‘We used to do a lot of cooking at the table. I was flambéing a chicken and caught a lady’s hair on fire. I put the ice bucket on her head and that was that. I ran into the toilet and didn’t come out for the whole night. Everything was cooked in the kitchen and finished up in the dining room. I thought, the flames aren’t big enough—so I poured half a bottle of brandy in and, of course, the whole thing blew up and so did her bouffant hairdo. That was the end of my waiting career.

‘There was no way Madame Louise was going to sack me. She wanted me to end up owning her restaurant. I was employed there to be her son forever. She looked after me like a mother. All she had was older foreign waiters and all of a sudden she had someone to look after. I didn’t repay her with kindness, because I left.’

Tony headed back to Christchurch, and The Coachman, which is where he says his career really started.

‘The Coachman was an entertaining restaurant. It was the first restaurant I had worked in that had a chef’s bar where your customers would sit in front of you so you could pretend you were somebody, flames came popping out. We were just exhibitionists really.’

Then one day a woman walked into his life and became his partner in both life and business. 

‘I have been very lucky to find someone like Beth,’ says Tony, who married in 1972. ‘Beth has worked here the whole time and still works here. We only see each other on Sunday. If you divide by seven we haven’t been married very long. We used to work day and night together but now she just does days and does the books. I really don’t see her until Sundays because I don’t get home until two in the morning and she is here at 6am. She does the vacuuming and polishes the silver.

‘We don’t have a life. This is our life. This restaurant is a funny one and that’s why it has probably lasted so long. Our customers are our friends and after 40 years the grandchildren of our original customers are now themselves customers. It is quite interesting. The restaurant is my social life. At night time, out of 10 of the tables I will know about five of the tables. We still have that loyalty. There are not many restaurants that have loyalty.’

When Tony received the lifetime achievement award from Cuisine magazine he didn’t go to the ceremony. When he hadn’t arrived he got a panic-stricken call asking where he was. 

‘You’re receiving an award. Get down here,’ he was told. Begrudgingly, Tony left the restaurant in his chef’s jacket and went to the ceremony. Tony got letters two days later: “You weren’t here, and we came here especially to see you.” Customers want to see you. Now if I have to go away or I am sick, we close.

‘I think it’s a trust thing. We have our detractors as you can imagine. Some of the food writers don’t get me. That’s fine, I don’t like them much either. I’m too opinionated for them. Someone once asked me if I had ever Googled myself. I thought no, I have never done that. Where did they get all this from? There is pages, and pages and pages. I spent three hours reading about myself.’

One of Tony’s enduring claims to fame is his mentorship of many of the city’s most successful chefs. ‘Some of them are famous and some of them aren’t. Simon Gault has been hugely successful and he was my first apprentice. Michael Meredith was a trainee chef with me. I haven’t been to Meredith’s yet but my wife has been many times. I am very proud of them both and the success they have achieved.’

Despite his reputation as a mentor, Tony is less enamoured with today’s current crop of chef wannabes. 

‘Young apprentices today take you to task. They don’t have to work. You can’t say they are no good; but rather they are not yet competent. Give me a break! If you are useless you are useless. I try and tell people I think you should change your job because you are never ever going to do this. You know if someone’s going to cook or they’re not. When people go through the motions, I would like to give them a smack in the head.’

How long can he keep his energy and spirit up for the restaurant? 

‘I am thinking 45 years now. I’m still healthy and still energetic,’ he says, knocking on wood. ‘Maybe another 10 years. I don’t know. I don’t think Beth thinks that’s a good idea.”

 The conversation turns unexpectedly sombre when Tony recalls his estrangement with his father over his choice of career. 

‘In 1965 boys didn’t cook and it wasn’t a sexy job. I didn’t exist to my father for 10 years. I went down to Christchurch after being away for five years and I went out with my family. My father was a very good cricketer and we were out, and his friends asked who I was.  I’m his son.  They would say, you can’t be, he’s only got four children. He never said I existed because he was embarrassed I was cooking for a living. That was the worst time of my life; finding out I didn’t exist anymore. I never forgave him. 

‘We had a big dinner here. It was probably our 20th birthday. I got him up to Auckland. He had never worn a dinner suit and it was all black tie. He stood up and apologised in front of all these people, and I stood up and said I’m sorry, I am not accepting it. Of course, the rest of the people thought I was the worst person in the whole world, because I couldn’t accept my father’s apology.

‘I spent a week with him before he died and we did sort of make-up. I still didn’t apologise to him. I didn’t see why I had to accept his apology. He ruined 10 years of my life, and it pissed me off quite frankly.’

With the demands of his own business taking precedence, Tony rarely gets the chance to sample the offerings of the city’s vibrant and oft-changing dining scene. 

‘I went to Ponsonby the other night and that’s probably the first time in three years I have been there. When do I go out late at night? They are all lazy bastards around this town. They all close at nine o’clock. I take my last booking at eleven. If someone wants to come in at eleven, I’ll take them.’ 

And this is where the conversation winds down. Tony is, and will undoubtedly continue to be, a renegade. He is the original restaurant rock star. Running his business his way and taking no prisoners. Like him or leave him, Tony Astle will not be ignored.