My mother baked scones six days a week for a cafe
And did a day a week at the Auckland Art Gallery coffee shop, so I got my first weekend job there when I was a teenager – clearing tables and scaring off the pigeons. Later, working in a live-in pub
in the UK, I was making salads and serving using a dumb waiter, but nobody had taught me how to do anything and I was terrible so I used to get abusive notes back in the dumb waiter!
In the late 1980s I waited tables at Guadalupe on Karangahape Rd
It was a game-changing restaurant in many ways. Candles became sculptures of dripped wax, chairs made from pigskin had been imported from Mexico, artist Denys Watkins had painted directly on the walls. There were two sides – "passion" had smaller, more intimate tables, while "pain", with its big banquet tables and church pews for seating, was all about serving large, rowdy groups. We waitresses all wore our hair in high buns and wore lots of makeup and peasant-y embroidered tops. Valo was the maitre d' and everyone was "darling". To this day it stands out as quite a cultish restaurant. I adored it.
I did a trial at Prego in 1990
It was full on, and I was just thrown into it: "Here's an apron, here's a pen – now go and prove yourself". Every night for the week I was trialling - I'd just go home and cry because I kept getting things wrong. I was amazed that I was offered a job at the end of it. That was the beginning of my career; the start of my ambition in the industry and working up to becoming maitre d'. It was a successful business and I admired many of the people working there. I quickly became addicted to the work.
I spent a quarter of a century at Prego, only leaving in 2015
But I did leave to work for a couple of years at SPQR, which was also owned by Kelvin [Gibson] for a while during that time, and a few years at Metropole, too. Between these three restaurants, I learned just about every lesson you could about hospitality and front of house. I also learned a lot about different facets of New Zealand culture. Prego was self-made people and family. Metropole was money. SPQR was sexuality. Within one decade, I got a handle on those three elements of our society.
Metropole was intimidating at first
Ponsonby of that time was big families, it was working-class. Then a few sets of traffic lights across town to Parnell and you didn't know what flash car was going to pull up outside the restaurant each night – there was just so much money. How could a girl from Onehunga find a way to relate to these wealthy people? That was what the voice in my head was wondering.
