Why there's so much love for S.P.Q.R (+recipe)

SPQR restaurant is a Ponsonby Road institution. Photo / Natalie Slade

Summer and winter, for lunch, dinner, a snack or drinks, you can sit on the footpath at a table with a crisp white tablecloth. It's always been that way. If the outside tables are full, the next best thing is a table in the covered portico, just inside the front door, where you can still see the ebb and flow of people and traffic on Ponsonby Road. In summer there are long, languid evenings on the pavement and in winter there are candles, the red tail lights of homeward-bound cars and the warmth of the fireplace.

You sit there because in doing so, you are comfortable and feel you belong. You feel a connection to your city. No doubt you will see someone you know wandering past and invite them to join you for a drink or a plate of pasta. Your water glass has always been kept topped up from a tall copper water jug and you barely need to finish your drink before a waiter asks if you'd like another. Usually you say yes, because it's just that sort of place.

It is a place for everyone, from millionaires to the stony broke, and all walks of life have always been welcome. It is in this way that S.P.Q.R has become a barometer of the city. So often you realise the city is in a subdued mood when S.P.Q.R is quiet. You know summer is really, properly here when you drive past at 2.30 in the afternoon and every outside table is taken. The sun is shining and people are sitting on the black Eames chairs with sunglasses on, and there is champagne in ice buckets on the starched white tablecloths. A very large part of you would like to abandon the rest of your day, cancel all appointments and join in for the afternoon. Maybe even stay on for the evening.

This is the essence of S.P.Q.R and it's always been that way since the day in late November 1992 when it opened. S.P.Q.R was the brainchild of cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh and his then partner, filmmaker Dorthe Scheffmann: the idea was to create an income stream that would help them make films. The result was the kind of eatery that Auckland hadn't really seen before. They converted a building that had formerly housed a motorcycle workshop - yes, back then Ponsonby was still ungentrified enough that there was a bike mechanic right on the main drag. It looked like something out of a film set, from the wrought-iron front gates to the copper bar. It was dark and moody inside, with dramatic lighting and a fog of smoke because back then you could still smoke in cafés and bars.

In the early days it was as much a place to drink as it was a place to eat and it was helped in that regard by the fact that it had a licence to stay open until 2am when few other places on the strip could. It was, in fact, the place to drink on Ponsonby Road and its opening, really, showed that Ponsonby had hit a sort of critical mass. The suburb - traditionally working class, populated through the 1960s and 1970s by immigrants from the Pacific Islands because the houses were large and cheap - was changing fast.

Waves of educated, liberal - and often gay or lesbian - couples had been moving into the area for a decade or more, attracted by the proximity to the city and cute Victorian villas, but by the start of the 1990s, Ponsonby was properly established as a liberal stronghold, popular with people who worked in media and advertising, the centre of the city's new economy. The balance of power was shifting in a city traditionally dominated by professionals who lived in the eastern suburbs. And S.P.Q.R was where they drank.

They drank there for parties and they drank there on Fridays and they drank there for the first Hero Parade in 1995, when float after float of outrageousness was towed down Ponsonby Road, a flotilla of hot pants, feather boas and sequins. It was a parade that both shocked and delighted the city. It announced, finally, that the city had changed forever. S.P.Q.R, of course, was in pole position.

The place wasn't a gay bar - it has always welcomed all comers - but it had a lot of gay staff and a long tradition of hiring drag queens on their days off and so the place was always fantastically camp - in fact, in many ways the service bordered on rude, but that was all part of the fun. In the early days, it was led by an Italian by the name of Johnny Caracciolo, who announced its opening by sending bottles of champagne all over the city by taxi. The service always had a huge theatrical spirit - the décor not only looked like a film set, it was also a stage and a catwalk on which the staff paraded nightly.

In 1995, Dryburgh and Scheffmann sold S.P.Q.R - to fund Scheffmann's first short
films, The Beach and The Bar - to Kelvin Gibson, the long-time owner of Prego, along with two of his key staff, Anthony Evans and Chris Rupe, who had recently returned from a decade working in London and Sydney. The three kept it largely unchanged. There was that Hero Parade each year and there were leather parties and masquerades, drag parties and champagne flowing. More often than not, there were people - let's admit it, they were often the staff - dancing on the bar or dancing on the tables. The party carried on.

In 1998, Anthony died and eventually Chris and then partner Paula Macks bought the whole place. By the turn of the millennium, it was still in full party mode: it was a particularly hedonistic period in the city's history, as staying up all night on less-than-legal substances became de rigueur and so did house music and drinking brightly coloured cocktails. There are photo albums of that period recording parties that were ever more outrageous.

However, S.P.Q.R was also always a very good place to eat, with an Italian-inspired menu of small plates - it was ahead of its time in more ways than one - and it's always been a fine place to go for a couple of glasses of wine in the early evening. Gradually, S.P.Q.R's regular patrons got mortgages and started having families. At the same time, Chris and Paula realised that if they were to survive long term, then they needed to be a restaurant with really great food. Bars come and go: if you're going to last then you need to have food. Really good food.

From the start, everything was made from scratch out the back in the tiny kitchen, led by Rosalyn ('Roz') Connal, an indomitable Cook Islander who was the restaurant's head chef for 20 years until she died in 2009 of breast cancer. Chris and Paula had spent a lot of time in Italy, in Rome and on the Amalfi Coast, and it was that food that really worked for them - tomatoes and seafood, simple flavours and lots of fresh produce. 'Salt and lemon. I couldn't really beat it, and so that's what we did with the food,' says Chris. From the start, the ingredients were the most important part of the menu. Buffalo mozzarella from Clevedon, the best oysters, the best steak; using free-range chicken and pork long before it was fashionable to do so.

In the years since, the restaurant has turned into a true local, generous with portions, welcoming to everyone and, in its way, softer. The service became less camp - it's still warm, but is less outrageous than it was. 'People got tired of it as time drew on,' says Chris. 'They got sick of that prima donna stuff. That's another survival thing - to focus on the food and the welcome.' And yet, it still has that old S.P.Q.R buzz: walk in the door and they're highly likely to tell you that 'you look a million bucks, darling'.

And in the past few years, the place has become a classic. Now, the children of the
regulars come in for a glass of wine and a pizza, or they come for champagne and oysters on their 21st birthdays. The place is worn in all the right ways. The kitchen is barely changed: the pots and pans are beaten up, blackened and bent from use.

Some of the staff have been there almost since it opened. There's Tere the chef who has been there coming on 17 years, Margaret who does the accounts has also been there 17 years, and James Hall the manager, 18 years. The staff bathroom out the back records their comings and goings in graffiti that covers the walls from floor to ceiling, poetry and remembrances and farewell notes.

The menu has stayed broadly the same for a decade - which is not to say it's stale, just that it was always classic and it still is; and there are seasonal changes and seasonal specials. But S.P.Q.R's regulars, they say, know what they're going to eat before they leave the house and that's sort of the point. The wine list, too, is generous: you can order a bottle of Veuve Clicquot or you can order a $6 glass of house white and the staff will treat you the same. 'Sometimes you can get too greedy,' says Chris. 'I never charged a lot because I always wanted people to come back.'

I used to live nearby and, late one night, a musician friend decided that what we really needed was an S.P.Q.R crème brûlée, which is a thing of great generosity: it comes in a large, wide bowl and is about three times the size of any other crème brûlée in the city, yet somehow it isn't overwhelming and it doesn't lose that crucial consistency. He rang, and somehow cajoled them into packaging up a couple to take away. He set off on foot, and arrived home half an hour later with two crème brûlées in china bowls wrapped in cling film, with a promise made to return the bowls the next day. You don't get more S.P.Q.R than that.

Caprese Salad

Photo / The S.P.Q.R Cookbook

This is a really popular dish at S.P.Q.R. It's such a great combination of the saltiness of the prosciutto and the freshness of the buffalo mozzarella and the vine-ripened tomato, drizzled with a very good extra virgin olive oil - incredible. This beautiful dish is great for lunch or an early evening meal. It is best paired with a glass of crisp Marlborough sauvignon blanc.

Serves 4

4 × 125g buffalo mozzarella balls
8 medium vine-ripened tomatoes
8 prosciutto slices 8 fresh basil leaves
flaky sea salt (see page 230) and extra virgin olive oil, to garnish

Slice the buffalo mozzarella balls into four and arrange on a serving dish. Slice the tomatoes and place on top of the mozzarella. Arrange the prosciutto slices on the plate. Garnish with basil leaves, sprinkle with flaky salt and drizzle with olive oil.

Reproduced with permission from S.P.Q.R. Published by Penguin Group NZ. RRP $60.00. Copyright text pages 7-15 © Simon Farrell-Green, 2014. Copyright photography © Tamara West, 2014.