Kate Hardwick: proudly "the chick from Vixen Burger". Photo / Nicola Edmonds
Kate Hardwick, a self-described 'city girl', talks with Amanda Saxton about moving to a small Wairarapa town to open a burger shop and how it changed her
Kate Hardwick, who'd always been a city girl, experienced some resistance when she told Wellingtonian friends she was moving to a small rural town to open a takeaway joint. "They thought I was effing mad," the 53-year-old remembers. But Hardwick, grieving her daughter's death, thought it made perfect sense.
When Hardwick was little and armed with a knife, she loved cutting tomatoes into crowns. "I come from a family with a strong food tradition," she says. "Like, food is important to us. It's something that we all think about and talk about."
Hardwick worked in restaurants as a teen, and loved anything to do with their kitchens. But she didn't consider cooking a real career option. As everyone around her chanted, there was too little money for too much hard work. And Hardwick was a girl expected to go to university.
So she earned her degree in architectural studies. "I do really like the subject," she says. "I can talk about old buildings for hours. But working sitting down, in a gloomy room by myself … Well, I just got sort of fat and lonely."
She missed people, creativity and thinking on her feet. The solution seemed obvious: a return to kitchens. She's gone on to cook in "literally hundreds" of them.
In the late-80s there was Brer Fox, the now well-known restaurateur Steve Logan's first restaurant. She worked at esteemed food writer Lois Daish's Mount Cook Cafe. Had stints at Deluxe and Midnight Espresso, late-night Wellingtonian institutions that set an enduring vibe – eclectic decor, beautiful counter food – for the capital's coffee culture. Ran Mojo's dispatch kitchen, supplying 16 cafes around the city. Hardwick's also cooked in the United States and in Ireland, where an Italian chef was so incensed by her presence (Hardwick was hired while he was away) that he refused to address her directly. "A woman wasn't supposed to be in the kitchen unless she was, of course, mama and cooking at home," she laughs.
That was probably Hardwick's most meaningful restaurant experience, though not for the misogynist chef. It was because the only other non-Italian there, an Irish guy named Patrick McGauley, is the father of her child. "We ended up getting together and he came to New Zealand with me for a while and we had a daughter, who unfortunately died of cancer," Hardwick explains in a stricken rush. It's very difficult for her to talk about Eva, who was diagnosed with nasopharyngeal carcinoma when she was 15. The cancer was first identified in her neck and spread fast.
Eva was the sort of girl who, knowing she didn't have long to live, launched a campaign to support victims of sexual assault. "She was born sensible and emotionally intelligent," says Hardwick. "She was incredibly kind, very outspoken, and such a hoot. We did a lot of laughing."
But let's rewind. Hardwick and McGauley were in Wellington when their relationship foundered. He returned to Europe (though remained a dedicated dad to Eva). Hardwick soldiered on as a single mum, running a deli and teaching cooking classes. She described the latter as "home economics with booze".
When Eva was diagnosed in 2015, Hardwick gave up work to look after her. When Eva died, three years later, a grieving Hardwick rented out her house, moved in with a friend, and did temp work. All of a sudden, New Zealand plunged into Covid-induced lockdown. Demand for temporary staff in the hospo sector evaporated. When lockdown lifted, Hardwick decided to sell her house and leave Wellington.
"It was too traumatic," she says. "Every time I passed the hospital, my heart would pound. Everywhere I'd go, there were memories and ghosts and I had to get rid of them."
But Hardwick didn't want to move too far from her octogenarian mum, either. One fateful long weekend, a friend invited her up to a scrappy rural town just an hour from the Beehive: Featherston, where everything fell into place. "I fell in love with this gorgeous little 100-and-something-year-old classic Kiwi shop on Fox St," Hardwick says. A "for lease" sign in its window felt auspicious. A walk-through with the agent later that day revealed a decent kitchen and massive chiller. A plan began taking shape in her head. Hardwick wanted to add "burger joint" to the shop's lengthy resumé of butchery, fruit leather factory, fish shop, fish and chippery, and smoked fish factory.
"I knew I needed a project that would absorb all my time and energy," she says. And thus Vixen Burger – Hardwick's takeaway shop making burgers for non-burger people – was conceived.
As Vixen Burger gestated, Hardwick readied its premises. She re-wired the shop, installed equipment, built a wooden deck over wasteland to the side, and commissioned a mural of flying space burgers to brighten up the outside area. On sunny days, customers sit there to eat their "Bandita Melts" (a black bean patty with sour cream and spicy adobo sauce) "Fatimas" (lamb kibbeh, feta, pickled red onion, and tahini) and "Foxy Ladies" (beef, blue cheese, fig-kalamata relish) off Hardwick's collection of retro enamel trays. An orange floral one was a gift from Eva.
Why burgers, one might ask. Hardwick loves their contained-ness: "They have all these elements inside, different flavours and textures and temperatures, like little worlds unto themselves." But aren't they greasy junk food? Hers are "absolutely wholefood".
Pretty much everything at Vixen Burger is made in-house, from buns to patties to sauces (except ketchup). Ingredients arrive raw and fresh each morning, most locally sourced. Veges from Greytown, chicken from Kāpiti, eggs from up the road, artisan cheese from round the corner.
As for the burger as a metaphor for life? "I think the meat or meat equivalent represents family, the foundation you build out from," she muses. "Buns are surroundings you find yourself in, because you've got to work within those confines." Salad is obviously the need to keep things fresh and sauce is frivolity. Salt is critical.
Like life, Hardwick says, burgers are all about balance.
If burgers are worlds between buns, Vixen Burger is Hardwick's new world between walls. She gets there by 8am and starts making brioche buns, one batch using aquafaba for the vegans. Produce rolls in, then Daniella. The women dive into deep-prep, singing along to hearty female vocalists like Amanda Palmer, Peggy Lee and Lady Gaga. "All singers who keep you going," Hardwick says.
"Our Whitney Houston special always makes people laugh when they come in." Orders start arriving by 3pm, as does Campbell – who is front-of-house. At 4pm sharp, the trio converge for the daily quiz and a rallying chat. Then it's "hard and fast for the next four hours", says Hardwick. When the last customer leaves, the crew debrief. On hectic days, there are galvanising shots of tequila before the big clean-up. Hardwick doesn't head home until 10.30pm.
"I kinda love it," she says. She kinda loves Featherston, too. The town of about 2500 hasn't experienced neighbouring Greytown's spectacular gentrification or proliferation of natty boutiques. Nor does it get Martinborough's onslaughts of weekend wine-seekers. Yet all Wellingtonians must drive through Featherston to reach either destination. They pass its stately old buildings, several rotting into the ground. And note it is "Proudly New Zealand's Only Book Town", boasting an impressive six book stores within 400m (Where the Wild Things Are characters are papered across the derelict yellow Cox's Building). There's a ramshackle store dedicated to "wiccan supplies"; likelier diversions include Vixen Burger, Monsieur Fox the vintage shop, or Hardwick's all-time favourite cheesery, C'est Cheese.
"I think Featherston has always just lagged behind a bit, but it's starting to catch up," says Hardwick, hopefully. She found herself riveted by recent local body elections and most people on the ballot were her customers. On Meet The Candidates Night, so as not to distract Featherstonians from their civic duty, she chose not to open Vixen Burger. Hardwick also admits she mainly wanted the chance to go heckle candidates herself.
One degree of separation takes some getting used to, says Hardwick. "When you move to a small town you become a 'Thing That Has Happened'. You feel more exposed because you feel so seen." At the start, she was baffled by the fact strangers smiled and waved at her. "I was like, 'Huh?' Then I realised they just do that to everybody, and you just smile and wave back. It's cool."
Hardwick sees others more clearly, too – as individuals, not the smear of humanity they can seem in a city. Featherston is home to "an international expert in Chinese language, a Canadian who used to be a priest in Japan, a lot of people from far away who really choose to be here," she notes. There's also beloved children's author Joy Cowley, a bunch of tinfoil hat-wearers and the inhabitants of a notorious P house. Hardwick is proudly "the chick from Vixen Burger". Hearing her customers' stories gives Hardwick the cosy sense that those in the South Wairarapa are all in it together.
It's been four years since Eva died. Hardwick says she could easily have mouldered away in grief. Instead, she very deliberately wrote a playbook for self-healing.
"Moving to Featherston gave me the space to make new memories," she says. And all the hard work at Vixen Burger, her first business, gives her "the sense I've created something new that is good". Today, Hardwick feels more engaged with the world than she has done in years.
"I am starting to be myself again," she says.
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