Schoolgirls with expensive tastes close down top restaurant

Three schoolgirls - one aged 14 and two 15 - with platinum tastes in champagne have brought a top Auckland restaurant to its knees.

Mikano Restaurant and Bar at Mechanics Bay on the Auckland waterfront is closing for 11 days from today after having its liquor licence suspended for serving the girls, who were wearing make-up and were said to have been well-dressed and well-mannered.

The adolescent high-rollers from East Auckland ran up a bill for $562 - including $375 for two bottles of champagne - before ordering a limousine and trying to make a getaway to the Sky City casino without paying.

Police were called after the 14-year-old ring-leader, named in a Liquor Licensing Authority decision as Amber, said she had lost her father's credit card and was unable to pay the bill.

Earlier, after the girls quaffed several glasses of spirits and a $110 bottle of Taittinger champagne with their meals, Amber had wandered up to the bar to ask for the house's finest wine.

This turned out to be Sir Winston Churchill's Pol Roger champagne, the British wartime leader's favourite tipple, with a price tag of $265.

"They were like the teenage equivalents of Thelma and Louise," restaurant owner John Gosney said ruefully today as his staff took last orders before the suspension.

Despite accepting that the restaurant had to pay a price for slipping up, he said it was the victim of an attempted "scam" and that the authority should also send a message to young people and their parents that they had to be responsible for their actions.

Mr Gosney stands to lose about $100,000 in takings and his 45 staff will have to take unplanned holidays or turn their hands to maintenance duties, after a decision from the liquor authority last week.

The authority accepted that Mikano, which hosted rugby star Jonah Lomu's wedding after-match party, operated for 10 years with an unblemished record before the girls turned up one busy night in January during the America's Cup regatta.

Authority chairman Judge Edward Unwin and member John Crookston agreed with its lawyer that the trio's choice of venue and expensive tastes lulled staff into a false sense of security about their ages.

But in a decision introduced as "a cautionary tale for all restaurateurs", they said the circumstances reflected little credit on its policies and systems.

"Reputable restaurants are not the places where we expect to find such breaches of the (Sale of Liquor) Act - the conduct of the staff and management appeared to range from naive to careless."

They also suspended the certificate for a month of duty manager Joanna Diment, whose appointment the restaurant failed to notify the police or licensing officials of, a breach which will account for one day of Mikano's 11-day stand-down.

Mr Gosney accepted that the restaurant erred, and said staff were given extra host-responsibility training to guard against any future transgression, but he had counted on a much shorter suspension.

He said Mikano was an unlikely target of under-aged drinkers but believed its prominence prompted the liquor authority to use it as an example to send a message to others.

Restaurant Association chief executive Neville Waldren, who testified to the authority that Mikano was a very professionally-run establishment, said such "extreme punishment" would send shockwaves through the industry.

The authority heard that Amber invited her friends to dinner by promising to pay the bill with her father's credit card, and that they others got changed and put on make-up at her house.

They accepted they would have looked older than their age, although not necessarily over 18.

Mr Gosney, who was not at the restaurant at the time, said he understood they arrived from somewhere around Howick in a taxi with no money to pay the fare and gave the driver a watch instead.

They were seated in a tucked-away part of the restaurant and staff became suspicious of their ages only after they tried to buy an inordinate number of cigarettes.

Two of the girls' fathers arrived, one of whom eventually settled the bill after the other objected to paying for the alcohol component and expressed irritation at being called out at such a late hour.