SPQR's three founding partners took a big gamble in 1992 when they opened a neighbourhood bar and eatery on a "desolate, windswept" stretch of Ponsonby Rd. Photo / Alex Burton
In 1992, an English cinematographer, a Danish producer and an Italian restaurateur walked into a bar – and changed the face of Ponsonby. Stuart Dryburgh and partner Dorthe Scheffmann were the money, Johnny Caracciolo brought the style.
SPQR’s heady founding partnership ruptured just a few months after the doors opened but by then, it had already become the stuff of legends. In the wake of last month’s abrupt closure, leaving debts of more than $2 million, the three people who brought the Auckland restaurant to life shared its colourful origin story with Joanna Wane.
Dryburgh had wrapped The Piano with Jane Campion and was about to start on Once Were Warriors with Lee Tamahori when he and partner Dorthe Scheffmann opened SPQR in an old motorcycle workshop on Ponsonby Rd in November 1992. Three years later, the couple sold up to a trio led by arch-rival Kelvin Gibson at Prego, a few blocks away.
Now remarried and living in New York, Dryburgh is heading back to Auckland next week to shoot a seven-part Netflix series, East of Eden. Reportedly starring Florence Pugh, it’s based on the classic John Steinbeck novel that inspired a 1995 feature film with James Dean in his screen debut.
“In the early 90s, Ponsonby Rd was desolate. At night, the block from where we lived on Picton St right down to Franklin Rd was all packs of wild dogs and newspapers blowing in the breeze. Then SPQR and Tuatara opened within weeks of each other and it went from being a godforsaken windswept street to a hot, cookin’ strip. In the early days, there were literally transvestites doing drag shows on the bar.
Dorthe and Gregor Nicholas had a production company, This is It, and we’d got a job in Melbourne, selling our souls for BP. There was an Italian restaurant bar on Chapel St, Caffé e Cucina, that we absolutely loved. Auckland had nothing like it so when we got home, we had this lunatic idea that we should open one.
Over the years we’d got to know Johnny, the maitre d’ at Metropole in Parnell, so we pitched the idea to him: we’ll put in the money, you do the sweat equity to run the place and develop it as a restaurant.
I’d been an architecture student before I got into the film business, so I drew up a rough plan. We found somebody to make the copper bar and light fittings. We found somebody to import the black Eames chairs. Johnny brought the name.
Graeme Burgess came on board as architect, we made a deal with the landlord, put down a deposit and slammed into it. When we started cleaning up the place, there were still oil stains on the floor.
Johnny went on a trip to Rome and brought back all sorts of little SPQR things that we stuck around the place. His cousin’s pizza recipe was pretty much still the way the dough was made right up until the doors closed.
He was very plugged into the Auckland gay scene and brought such a great personality to the place. Crazy things like these fantastic old urinals for the bathroom that a lot of the lesbian girls liked to use.
We definitely embraced the whole bohemian aspect of it. Occasionally you’d find somebody taking the mirror off the wall in the bathroom. Actually, I think Johnny naughtily had made it possible that you could.
I think we opened on a Sunday afternoon. It was all very hands-on and very fun. I was working behind the bar making cappuccinos and pouring beers. At first, we were very ambitious, serving breakfast and staying open until late, which was just too much for a stupidly small kitchen.
As sometimes happens, things didn’t work out. We had a falling out with Johnny and parted ways quite early into the thing. Esther Lamb [who’d been headhunted by Caracciolo and Scheffmann to be maitre d’] took over and really made the place run.
Central Auckland was slowly being gentrified, mostly by people like us who’d been living there as students and hippies in the 60s and 70s and got the opportunity to buy houses because they were quite cheap. Nobody wanted old villas then. So the first wave of residents wasn’t stockbrokers and hedge-fund managers. They came later.
I don’t even remember why we decided to sell it. I was starting to get work overseas and Dorthe was left holding the proverbial baby. I went off to shoot Lone Star for John Sayles, which is where I met the woman I’m married to now. So things all got very complicated, domestically. And I never really went back to New Zealand after that.”
Described by SPQR’s maitre d’, Esther Lamb, as a “peacock on the floor”, Caracciolo was born in Rome but moved to Auckland at the age of 11 when his parents separated. His first flat as a teenager was above Ivan’s, another legendary restaurant that opened on Ponsonby Rd in the mid-60s and was famous for its lavishly buttered slices of white bread.
Caracciolo spent the 80s in London, where he opened a restaurant, The Twos, on the border of Islington and Hoxton – an early indication of his instinctive sense for knowing when a neighbourhood was about to take off. Back in Auckland, he launched GLO magazine, did some modelling and made a name for himself as a colourful personality on the hospitality scene, running the front of house at Vinnie’s, a fine-dining restaurant in Herne Bay, and at Metropole, a Parnell lounge bar that was uber-cool at the time.
After the rift with Scheffmann and Dryburgh, who bought him out of SPQR in mid-1993, Caracciolo returned to Rome. For the past 30 years, he’s worked as a freelance tour guide across Italy. Last December, he flew to Auckland to marry his longtime partner, Russ Quinlivan, whom he met through SPQR on a trip back to New Zealand almost 12 years ago. His mother, who’s 95, still lives on Ponsonby Rd.
“Somewhere along the line, I got spotted by Dorthe, who asked me to cater for Stuart’s 40th birthday at their house in Picton St. Once Were Warriors was in mid-shoot and everybody was there. It was a very special affair.
Within a week after that, I was summoned to her office. She and Stuart loved what was going on in Melbourne at the time and the idea was to create a cool, totally democratic neighbourhood eatery that was simple and affordable, where you could come and stay for as long as you liked. They’d put in the money and I would be the silent third partner.
The sad demise of Parnell had already started; that was all crumbling with the crash that preceded it. It was time for Ponsonby to come to life. But the last thing I wanted was flying credit cards and another French Cafe vibe.
My attention went straight to the old bike workshop, which would become SPQR. Everybody was against it, saying, ‘No, no, that area is dead. It’ll never take off. You have to be in Three Lamps.’ There were quite a few empty shop fronts. The only exciting thing that was happening at the time was Cheryl Beere, who opened Atomic Cafe across the road.
So, it was still a bit of a dive to some people, but not to me. The LGBT community was rooted there already. Most of the girls or the boy-girls working on K Road had homes in Ponsonby. But really, it was about the extremes of the place – from the homeless and the halfway houses to a few blondes who saw it was a great market and sold their Parnell property to buy two in Ponsonby instead.
Stuart and Dorthe gave me an architect I worked really well with and a handful of paid professionals to help with all the licensing and bureaucratic stuff. They even gave me one of the first mobile phones – those army ones you wear over your shoulder with a receiver and huge battery pack.
The building work started and I shot back to Rome to get some inspiration. I was already into mid-century design and I recreated a lot of details that have been lost over the years behind all the plastic ivy and huge champagne umbrellas. Before we created that veranda, the windows were straight onto the street.
I had concrete benches made, which are just like the garden benches here in Rome, and the four letters of SPQR made in brass, which we simply pressed into the concrete at the entrance. I was there painting surfaces and had artists coming in to do the bathrooms, which were amazing. Everybody had a tiny little corner to embellish.
We opened in November, on my birthday. I’d been into every business up and down Ponsonby Rd, telling them we were there to revive the street and not to cause any kind of hassle or competition. I was welcomed with open arms by everybody – everybody except for Kelvin at Prego. He said, ‘It’s going to be war’ and he meant it.
SPQR took off with a bang and never stopped. In the morning, the tables were set with white linen for breakfast, which was coffee and croissants. Dorthe’s obsession was to come in every day with huge bunches of flowers and she insisted on the Charles Eames chairs. Stuart’s obsessions were the beer on tap and the coffee machine.
We were the first place to get a community licence, which meant that as long as food was provided, we could stay open and licensed from 8am until midnight, because the concept was a neighbourhood eatery and the idea was that locals would walk there.
There was a simple blackboard menu: three pizzas – usually one vege, one fish and one meat – three pastas and three main courses, which is exactly what I did in my cafe in London.
The lunches, especially, were amazing. You’d have a TVNZ news team and the flashy people over there, a table of workmen next to some old gals chatting about bridge, a couple of mothers with a whole bunch of kids running around, and drag queens having shots at the bar.
We were slammed, working 24/7, and I became really sick. I kept going to my doctor, who said I was just stressed. Then I began coughing up blood. I’d contracted tuberculosis on the flight back from Italy and ended up in hospital for three months.
By then, things had already started going wrong. Stuart said, ‘We’re buying you out’ and gave me a cheque for 10 grand. I decided to come back to Italy and I’m very happy I did. But I often wondered what my life would have been like if I’d stayed. I could still be there today.”
SPQR was a “fabulous flirtation” for Dorthe Scheffmann, who used it as the setting for her short film, The Bar, featuring an “it crowd” of young acting talent – many of whom are still familiar faces on the arts scene today.
Then the mother of three small children, Scheffmann saw the business as a way to fund a career switch from making other people’s work through her production company to creating her own.
In 1995, she directed The Beach, which was nominated for the Palme d’Or for Best Short Film at Cannes. Now a lecturer in screenwriting at Auckland University, she has several projects in development and recently completed her PhD in feminine language in cinema.
“For me, SPQR was always a performance piece – a piece of theatre. Aesthetically, we wanted to create a place where people were the art. Film crews used it as their clubroom; some of the very best nights were the Once Were Warriors after-shoot parties.
We had no business doing it, really, but Stuart and I had a tiny bit of money, which we hadn’t had before. It wasn’t much, something like 20 grand, and it all happened at film-industry speed. That first Friday night when people got up and danced on the bar, I remember standing there watching – probably smoking a cigarette – and thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is big.’
What we’d liked about Caffé e Cucina was the patina of the place and the fact that it belonged to a community. A lot of the restaurants in Auckland at the time seemed to serve certain sectors. The bankers went there. The agency people went there.
We were very much about creating an atmosphere where everyone was treated equally. It didn’t matter if you were in a suit or leather. When you have an egalitarian culture, you don’t care if it’s a Shortland Street actor or a teacher from Richmond Road [primary school]. And women wanted somewhere to meet for a drink without having to go to the local hotel.
It was a cool community that really supported what we were doing. Ron, our bank manager at Westpac, would pop up and check in. One of our mates decided to import Polish vodka and before you knew it, we had 70 dozen bottles of Sobieski stashed in our shed.
Those first lime-washed colours were an early uptake of that kind of paint type and have never looked better. The iron security gates were still being welded the day we opened, so two grip trucks were parked across the portico to protect all the booze inside until the gates were put into place.
The copper bar itself was a Charlotte Fisher piece and had the most beautiful fill light. People looked good and felt good sitting there. We made our money off people smoking and drinking at that bar.
For me, The Bar is still a favourite of all my films. We did 72 set-ups in two nights. Stuart shot the main unit, of course, and a second unit did all the stuff on Ponsonby Rd.
I wanted to see how much you could drive a story through character and place, so I worked out all the archetypes and got different writers to create different snatches of dialogue all the way around the bar.
On the corner, there’d often be a couple of guys talking louder than anybody else. They were the suits – and some of them were assholes. There was the couple who’d come every week, trying to resurrect their marriage. And then there were the deals going down…
It was a very creative time and a lot of fun. We’d worked so hard to make SPQR viable, but we’re film-makers – we wanted to make films. Stuart was shooting The Portrait of a Lady [with Jane Campion] and I wanted to put the children into school in Copenhagen for two years before they hit secondary school. You know, turangawaewae. It’s important to be able to bring your own stories to the table.
A few years later, as a solo mother of three, I’d drive past SPQR and a soundbite in my head would go ‘Ka-ching!’ I’m sad the times we’re living through now have made institutions like that unsustainable, but it was born out of a more optimistic economic and political situation. The conversation between the assholes in The Bar, you could run that today. None of that has really changed.”
Pubs are telling customers not to queue, saying it's 'foreign, unnecessary and bizarre'.