KEY POINTS:
For a few heady years in the mid-1980s, greed was good. Until the 1987 stockmarket crash took it all away, consumption was conspicuous and if you owned a share, you owned a company.
But while the events of Black Tuesday - it is Black Monday most everywhere else thanks to the International Date Line - put a damper on the decade for many, others still recall the good times before New Zealand's financial 9/11, 20 years ago next week.
"It was actually so giddy it was unbelievable," says Tony Astle, owner of Parnell eaterie Antoines.
"People didn't care what they paid for anything. They were outdoing one another at each table."
Auckland business types elevated lunch to the level of an artform, with many indulging in feasts up to six hours long, Mr Astle says.
There was a lot of money about, and a good deal of it was spent on $100 helpings of crayfish, or $450 bottles of Krug champagne. If the Krug and cray could be consumed as a combo, then all the better.
The excitement had been growing since the early '80s, and by 1987 a constant stream of sharebrokers, estate agents and speculators meant Mr Astle could charge $50 for a main, and take seven weeks' holiday.
But it wasn't just the wine that went to everyone's heads, he says. After a while Aucklanders' supreme self-confidence saw those living south of the Bombay Hills looking north with narrowed eyes.
"I think the people in Auckland were totally different. They suddenly thought they were better than everyone else, everywhere. But these were young people who fell over very badly."
PR guru Cedric Allan remembers the Krug and cray craze, too, though he was not eating a lot of it in those days. While the '80s were "exuberant times", there was "a heck of a lot of hard work done", he says.
Those were times when the sharemarket could rise and fall on the strength of an America's Cup win and the social scene was a red-hot affair if you were one of the beautiful people.
Although it may have been great fun, the entire Auckland social scene centred around barely 200 people, Mr Allan says. For everyone else, it was business as usual.
Now, 20 years on, things are good again. The wealth, however, is based on more tangible things, such as milk prices, he says.
Mr Astle - who has operated Antoines for 35 years - reckons it took until 1990 for the shock of the '87 crash to sink in fully. But he believes the giddy whirl that was the mid-80s - and the ensuing crash - was a once-in-a-generation phenomenon.
