Michael Fowler's Historic Hawke's Bay

One of Hastings' earliest cafés was Harry Bone's Imperial Café (pictured in 1905), which was located near where the BNZ is today, in Heretaunga Street West.

The café catered for 80 downstairs in a dining room, and 26 upstairs for morning and afternoon teas. A head baker was employed to make pastry goods.

An early baker and seller of pastry goods in Napier and Hastings was the humble pieman who, complete with a bell, walked the streets late at night, ringing his bell, and yelling out his wares for sale.

Napier had two in the 1880s, Joseph de Basques and John Ross.

Each of the piemen had marked their territories, but trouble occurred late one night in November, 1886, when both men came into contact.

A court case resulted after it was alleged Joseph de Basques assaulted John Ross, and John Ross' wife assaulted Joseph, after she grabbed his pie bell, and hit him. Both were found guilty, and spent seven and four days respectively in the Napier Prison doing hard labour.

Joseph de Basques left Napier in 1890, and appears to have lived in Canterbury, where he became somewhat of an authority on picking race horses.

In the 1890s he returned to Hawke's Bay, and settled in Hastings, in a building on the corner of King and Heretaunga streets (opposite the new Farmers building).

History was made when Joseph opened the first late-night mobile coffee cart in 1898, after convincing the Hastings Borough Council to let him stay open past 11pm - the closing time for bars.

Joseph died in June 1900 of natural causes, the paper carrying the gruesome details of the autopsy conducted at his house.

For a while Elijah Luke carried on as Hastings' pieman, but competition from cafés, such as the Imperial Café, saw the end of the pieman in Hawke's Bay.

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