Browns Eatery owner co-owner Jenefer Bilkey loves good food, coffee and flowers. Photo / Dean Purcell
In a tough economic climate when some cafe owners are being forced to shut, an Auckland husband-and-wife team now run three thriving cafes. Jane Phare drops in to find out the secret of their success.
Pop into Browns Eatery in Remuera any day of the week and not much changes. It’s invariably full of “ladies who lunch”, locals who’ve come for a coffee and a natter or customers who have driven there on the strength of its reputation.
Past bunches of fresh flowers in buckets by the door is a counter full of food that is reassuringly consistent – always fresh, crustless club sandwiches (the fillings never vary), trays of muffins that have just come out of the oven, home-baked afghans and gingerbread men, baguettes stuffed with fillings plus a sit-down menu.
It’s a formula that has worked so well that an outdoor area at the back has been covered to become The Glasshouse to accommodate more all-weather seating.
The owners, Jenefer Bilkey and her husband Dan Alderson, have replicated Browns Eatery twice more, opening the Kepa Road Cafe in Kohimarama four years ago, and the Brighton Road Cafe in Parnell last August.
Ask Bilkey why the Browns formula works and she takes time to ponder the question. She’s been so busy she hasn’t had much time to think about it.
So many reasons, she says. Freshly-prepared food and home baking using top-quality (and expensive) ingredients; everything’s fresh, from the lemons to the seasonings, she says.
“We don’t scrimp [on the ingredients] and I’m always saying that. Use the good butter and the good milk because people can tell.”
There’s a homely feel to the cafes, each of which has been extensive renovated. Lots of hard work, seven days a week. She and Alderson meet at one of the cafes regularly to make a list of what needs doing and what can be done better. And dedicated staff, Bilkey says. “We couldn’t do it without them. They all want to work with good people so we attract more good people and they have really helped us grow the businesses. Customers absolutely love them.”
Bilkey admits she’s fussy, for example rejecting a baguette that’s too thin. And she constantly “fiddles” to make sure the cafes, their decorations and bowls of fresh fruit look just right. She wants the food display cabinets to look full and inviting.
“If we run out we just rebake.”
That smell of something baking in the oven is part of the ambience.
“Gingerbread and chocolate brownies are our best smells.”
The cafes all have their own chefs and bakers, although the macarons are made in Parnell and then distributed to the other two.
The regulars who gather at Browns every day, some twice a day or more, consider it their second home. They’ve got to know people through the cafe and now help out those who live on their own and need something doing.
Remuera resident Michael Horton says he’s already been to Browns that morning when the Herald calls, and is about to go again to meet a friend.
“It’s like being in a social club when we go up there. We’ve got to know so many people.”
He and his late wife Dame Rosie Horton were daily visitors. When Rosie died last year, some of the Browns staff attended her funeral and displayed her photo and a candle at the cafe entrance. Horton, whose family owned Wilson & Horton, publishers of the Herald until 1996, describes Bilkey as “a marvellous operator”.
The cafe makes the “world’s best” muffins, he says, crispy on the edges and soft inside. Horton, who spends time at his apartment in Sanctuary Cove, says he’s yet to find a muffin that comes near it on the Gold Coast.
“I’ve been to every coffee shop in the Gold Coast and nobody can make a muffin like they can.”
Browns was originally a family affair. Bilkey’s family owned a jewellery store, Bilkey & Co in the Remuera shops, where she and her sister Kirsten Lloyd worked with their parents Bob and Lyn. Back in the 1990s the family also started a women’s fashion store nearby, Browns Boutique, and incorporated a small cafe in among the clothing.
Eventually, the family businesses began to part ways. Bob and Lyn retired and closed Bilkey & Co, and Lloyd took over Browns Boutique and subsequently opened two more clothing stores at Eastridge, Ōrākei and Greenwoods Corner in Royal Oak.
Bilkey took over the cafe business which, eight years ago, was a cramped space without a proper kitchen. Since then she’s opened two more Browns duplicates in Kohimarama and Parnell, offering the same selection of food.
Now she has around 50 staff – some of them part-time - including 10 chefs and bakers and a young general manager, who divides her time between the three cafes. The businesses got so busy that Alderson, an engineer who specialised in geothermal power stations, left his job six years ago to join his wife.
Walk into any of the cafes and Bilkey’s influence is obvious. The display cabinets are full of freshly-made food that is not long out of the kitchen. The muffins still sit in their trays. The cheese scones are made from Bilkey’s grandmother Yvonne’s recipe.
Bilkey says she likes to keep the offerings classic and simple, food that either she, her parents or her grandparents would like to eat.
“A lot of people just want a scone and a coffee, and just to be able to sit. They don’t necessarily want a big meal.”
And what about those who sit for too long or use the cafe as an office? Bilkey has been following the chatter about cafe etiquette after a Hawke’s Bay journalist was banned from a cafe for spending too long working there.
It’s a tricky one, she says. “It is really hard because some of the cafes are very small and some people do use them as a place they can work all day.”
She’s had people holding Zoom meetings with their microphones on so other customers can hear, and some who find an electrical socket and plug their lead in so it runs across where people are walking. But what to do?
“Clear the table,” she laughs. “You can’t really do much.”
Bilkey laughs, too, at the memory of her past life. Once she was grading precious diamonds in the jewellery business.
“Now I’ll be making sure the cafes are clean or making sandwiches early in the morning.”
All three sites have been renovated from the ground up and all have a theme. Parnell is styled like a small villa with a cute outdoor garden space; Remuera – with its marble counters and black-and-white decor - is timeless chic; and Kohimarama is based on a seaside boatshed. Alderson is about to arrive with a large red oar to mount on the wall.
They’re having French-style rattan cafe chairs made in Indonesia, an order that will take six months to arrive but Bilkey, intent on creating atmosphere, thinks they will be worth the wait.
Like other hospitality businesses, they were hit by Covid-19 and lockdowns. Bilkey and Alderson were in the middle of renovating an old locksmith shop in Kohimarama, now the Kepa Road Cafe, when Covid-19 hit. They pulled down the 1970s sparkly ceiling to find a high, sloping ceiling underneath, covered it in white planks and were ready to install the new aluminium doors at the front.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. But Bilkey did what every frantic business owner did back then – pivoted. She used the time to extensively renovate Browns in Remuera, setting up a pop-up cafe across the road in a former Pita Pit store. Layers of food were displayed in the window and coffee was served from the doorway behind a Perspex screen. Queues of locals lined up for a Browns fix.
“It was so busy because no one had anything to do, we were locked down.”
Across the road at Browns, the ceilings were raised, marble counters were installed and a new state-of-the-art kitchen was built.
In a strange way, Bilkey says, she enjoyed the Covid era because it threw her a challenge. Her daughter Mackenzie launched Browns online and Bilkey, Alderson and some of the staff delivered orders to homes all over Auckland. Bilkey’s son Monty learned to drive, under supervision, on the traffic-free roads during the deliveries. One Mother’s Day they left dozens of boxes of scones and muffins, and bunches of flowers on doorsteps throughout the day.
As if Bilkey doesn’t have enough to do, she and her daughter have been getting up pre-dawn to bid for flowers at the Mt Wellington flower markets. Flowers have always been part of her cafes, however, when her regular florist could no longer supply the blooms Bilkey took over.
“Yesterday we were online at an auction at 5am.”
They went a little overboard with the ordering and ended up having to put together 80 posies of flowers to distribute to the three cafes. Flowers are part of the feel, she says. They’re cheerful to walk past and could become an impulse buy, an unexpected gift for a friend or to take home to Mum when dads bring their kids in for a fluffy.
As for future plans, Bilkey’s not dismissing the possibility of a fourth cafe.
“The trick is to find the right site.”
Jane Phare is a senior Auckland-based business, features and investigations journalist, former assistant editor of NZ Herald and former editor of the Weekend Herald and Viva.
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