Ponsonby’s Lime Bar turns 25: What’s its secret to success?

Auckland’s hospitality scene is brutal - one day you’re hot, and the next you’re in liquidation. So how did a barely one-metre-wide cocktail bar with no blender and an ancient playlist become Ponsonby Rd’s greatest survivor? On the eve of Lime Bar’s 25th birthday, owner Kevin Fraser talks about doing business on the infamously social strip.

It was 1998. Christine Fletcher had just been elected mayor of Auckland, Bic Runga’s Drive was album of the year and according to the doomsayers, the world as we knew it would soon be coming to a Y2K halt. How and why did you get into hospitality?

Kevin Fraser: I’m an introvert. I started in fashion design. A dear friend of mine, Krishna Botica [Cafe Hanoi, Ghost Street, Perch Britomart] decided I was spending too much time in my own head space and that I should come and work with her at, back then, Metropole.

I went over part-time and realised I was actually quite good at it. I got to the point where I thought there was more money to be made out of booze than there was in fashion. Booze is hard. Fashion is harder.

My father offered to help. I was 28 and I had six-month-old twins. By then I was working at Tabac [now closed] and overseeing Mo’s Bar, so I had a sense of what small bars could do.

I took over this site at the end of ‘98. It was Sushi & Barfly before you could really get sushi in Auckland. It used to have this big concrete slab of a bar, which they poured in situ. You couldn’t get your knees under and you couldn’t get the food close enough to you. It was a disaster. Imagine trying to eat soup?

Do you think the people who design restaurants ever actually test out the tables?

I have definitely worked with restaurant designers who don’t know how to design bars! We just put a sledgehammer to it, broke it up and dragged it out.

My father is a builder. I designed it, he built it, and I said, “Well, you might as well be my business partner”. In for a penny, in for a pound.

It was a different time. We didn’t have to spend millions of dollars to open a business. It probably cost us $150 grand to get the doors open. The partnership went on for about 10 years and in that time we probably had 10 hospitality businesses.

Hobson Street Lounge. Plum in the Viaduct, which I eventually sold to Leo Molloy. I was the first tavern licence into Kingsland, with Ruby. I was one of the first bars in Fort Lane and literally the first one in Britomart with Boogie Wonderland because that whole area was still a car park. It went nuts for a few years and then I opened one in Wellington, and we had a little cocktail bar down the back called Alice.

And now . . . ?

Just this. I got out of everything else about 10 years ago. Divorce. Time to separate stuff out. Life admin needed to be taken care of. I’m remarried, very happily, and I’ve got a 13-year-old and my 25-year-olds are over in Australia and are great.

The customer service area at Ponsonby's Lime Bar is roughly 1m wide. Photo / Dean Purcell

Lime is a tiny space. Around 33-ish square metres? I’m trying to imagine it before the 2004 indoor smoking ban . . .

The area in front of the bar is about 1m wide and the bartenders would be working there with a cigarette! Once we had a bartender who’d just come from Prego. They’d given him a beautiful shirt as a leaving gift. He was leaning on the bar and a candle caught. It is amazing what cigarette smoke masked. Now you get some bloke standing at the bar farting. Body odour. All sorts of stuff.

Can you explain the playlist? There are five more recent “exclusion songs” - Tennessee Whiskey, Wagon Wheel, Mambo Number Five, Man I Feel Like A Woman and Don’t Want to Miss a Thing . . .

. . . The anthem songs!

But the rest of the playlist is exclusively ‘70s and ‘80s?

I get asked all the time, why has Lime worked? And we’ve continued to do the same thing for 25 years. We play the same music. For a long time, we said only pre-1990. We’re trying to work out how we transition into newer stuff and it’s a challenge. We get people going ‘I’m the only one here, why can’t you play what I want?’. Dude - I’ve been here 25 years. It’s a rule. We’ve recently decided, because, you know, we do have the next generation of customers coming through, that we’ll go back 30 years.

So not even Lorde makes the playlist?

Never. We just don’t.

What does that say about the clientele?

When I opened, I was 28 and probably most of my customers were in their late 20s and early 30s and we were OLD. When you’re that age, you feel so grown up. Now those customers are still coming in, in their 50s and 60s. We do get some 18-year-olds, but they might be with their parents. We’ve just run this promotion for a T-shirt slogan. There were five choices and the one that got 50 per cent of the votes was “This is my mother’s favourite bar”. And it’s true!

I have a friend who infamously sealed the deal with her now husband at Lime and their child is now 11. For a certain generation of Aucklanders, this was THE place to hook up. Has anything changed?

It’s a place where you meet people. You’re never far from anyone. We’ve got this thing that drifts across the bar that says “shots?” and I’ve seen this so many times - people are waiting for their order and then they’ll go ‘oh yeah, and two shots’, and then they’ll turn to a complete stranger and ask “do you want a shot”?

We’ve got a lot of really good regulars. They go through different life changes. They’re single, they meet someone, they go home, have babies, divorce - and then they come back.

Do you think hook-up culture has changed much over the past 25 years?

Sometimes older men don’t know how to look after themselves in public. They sort of lose all their faculties at once. We’re probably a lot more controlled around managing that now. You say: “We don’t do that”. Most of them have daughters and it’s a really easy conversation to have: “She doesn’t want to talk to you and she’s quite happy.” The rules have changed. The whole Me Too movement. It’s far less acceptable to be groping or touching and that goes for women too.

We can tell the Tinder dates. It’s quite a safe place to be because you can sit up at the bar, the bartender’s there . . . And you can see relationships building through regulars. You start seeing connections and then you hear that it’s all happening.

About nine or 10 years ago an old customer came in. I hadn’t seen him for ages; he’d moved out of Auckland. I was like ‘Oh, what brings you to town?’. He said “I’m up to see my twin daughters” - which had apparently happened the last time he’d been to the Lime Bar. We’re all care and no responsibility!

At the end of one night, bar staff found a woman’s underwear and shoes. And then I think it was her assistant, or maybe her daughter, rang the next day, “Oh, [redacted] left her shoes there” and the barman was like, “What about her knickers?”

Is there a trick to surviving 25 years in this business?

Our original regulars set a standard for how people behaved. They sang along, they drank champagne, they had a blast, they enjoyed themselves. Those core regulars are really important to any business. They’ve become family and sometimes family are a pain in the arse to deal with, but they’re family all the same. And I think our guys behind the bar, for the most part, have been phenomenal. There’s a lot of loyalty.

I think our crowd has probably got a little less raucous. We’re not as novel as we used to be. Other places now have elements of what we have. I remember getting a phone call back in the day from a guy who’d left something at the bar. He said, “Remember, I was the guy at the end, singing”? Buddy, the whole bar was singing. There was a special time, especially in the early 2000s, that was quite a magical time in hospitality.

Call a bar Lime and you have to serve lime cocktails, says owner Kevin Fraser. Photo / Dean Purcell

You must have witnessed a few drinking trends. Does anyone still order mojitos? What’s the most popular drink on the list?

It’s still margaritas and espresso martinis. Sometimes we can do 50 espresso martinis in a night. The mojito used to be our drink and gimlet. We still make a lot of whisky sours. A cocktail used to be $14. Now we’re at $20-$22. A lot of places are $24-$27.

Did you ever do creamy cocktails?

Maybe the Brandy Alexander at some stage? We don’t have Malibu, we don’t have coconut. I just don’t want to do pina coladas. We’ve never had a blender. We shake a lot with a lot of citrus. Call a bar “Lime” and even when limes are $60 a kilo we still go through 10kg a week. At the height of it, when they’re really expensive, it works out to about $1 a wedge and then you do a caipirinha and it’s got half a lime in it. But through the season I get them free from my inlaws!

Bars create a lot of potential for bad headlines. Drunks, drink spiking, drugs . . .

The reality is we’ve got an older crowd that drinks. I’m sure they’re not innocent but . . . We’re small, we can keep an eye on people, we can tell if something’s not right. Someone’s going to slip through the gaps, but we’ve got a great security guy who’s been with us for years and he knows everybody.

We’ve got this philosophy that it’s horrible to deal with drunks when they’ve got drunk somewhere else, but if they’re drinking with us, then it’s our responsibility. We’ve taken their money. We can’t just kick them to the kerb now. I’d like to say we’re a bar for grown-ups. You can have fun, but don’t be a child.

What’s the future for you and Lime Bar? Can you keep doing this?

I’ve been talking about this for a bit now. I reckon we’ll go until Lime is 30 and that’s when I’ll make my next decision. I’ll be almost 60. I don’t want to be a 60-year-old bartender.

Kim Knight joined the New Zealand Herald in 2016 as a senior feature writer for its lifestyle magazine titles. She has a special interest in food and hospitality journalism and has won numerous media awards for her lifestyle reportage.