The people behind three new Christchurch eateries tell Alex Casey why the city’s hospitality scene is bucking the doom and gloom trends.
Piripi Baker is under the pump trying to staff Papa’s Smashies thanks to winter bugs taking out his usual workers. Under the crisp blue Christchurch sky, he hangs up the phone after chatting to a potential fill-in, revealing that it was Max Perry – former co-owner of Fifth Street, now co-founder of Bones Pickles. “He’s pretty much a Michelin star chef and people pay him tonnes of money to make food for them because he’s so brilliant, but he’s also just offered to come and make fries for me if I’m short-staffed,” he says. “Turns out Christchurch has some of the most helpful people in the universe.”
Given that Papa’s Smashies frequently sells out within just an hour or two, Baker needs all the help he can get. His smashed burger joint, now run out of a converted warehouse on the city fringe, joins an ever-growing list of new places to eat in Christchurch, a place billed as being the most vibrant place for hospitality in the country.“Even three or so years ago, you knew all the spots that you wanted to go that people were talking about,” says Baker. “You could count them on two hands, and it now feels like we’re actually starting to lose track. There’s plenty of new offerings, and plenty of people giving stuff a go.”
Baker himself started Papa’s out of his driveway in North Beach, New Brighton, just last year. “We sold them literally out of my house without any permission or anything like that. But we didn’t get in trouble with the council, or our neighbours, so that was nice.” In fact, the opposite happened. “The community was really supportive, people kept sharing it and it started to grow a bit,” he says. He sold 140 burgers at his last pop-up, farewelling the driveway and moving into a shipping container in the converted warehouse Sydenham Underpass earlier this year.
“In some ways it felt way too soon, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised I couldn’t actually afford anything else,” he says. Papa’s opened as soon as Baker got an extractor fan installed – he didn’t even have the plumbing sorted yet, but his mate Jayden at Empire Chicken let him do all his prep and dishes in his kitchen. “Honestly, none of this would have ever happened without all those connections from the community,” says Baker. “I would be struggling way more if people here didn’t have such an amazing, friendly, supportive attitude.”
It was that same drive to foster a supportive hospitality scene that led Madie Macauley and Iain Collis to quit working for a “toxic” hospitality company in Christchurch and start their own Canadian-inspired doughnut business, Grumpy’s, also last year. “I think there are a lot of us mid-30s millennials who grew up breaking our backs in old school hospitality and know something needs to change,” says Macauley. “What we are seeing now is people wanting to collaborate and create community in hospitality in Christchurch, rather than competition.”
We are chatting as they prepare to open their first shop, just opposite Papa’s in that same Sydenham warehouse, and the sense of collaboration is evident even in the smallest of gestures. They run doughnut samples over to Piripi and his wife to try, in exchange for a wad of napkins for a certain unnamed greasy journalist. “It pays to be kind here,” says Collis. “Christchurch is a little bit too small to be a dickhead.” He was here for the quakes, and says the enormous shift in how people treated each other during that time has become permanent.
“Instantly everyone was like, ‘oh, hey, these are actually people around me, maybe let’s try to look after each other’. I think that is still very much a part of the city today.”
Across town at Peaches in Linwood, owner Tessa Peach agrees. “It does feel like a really supportive city, and I think it does come down to us still being in this post-quake environment. We’ve gone through this massive trauma of losing everything, so it feels like there is this real desire from everyone to make it work.” Even the enthusiasm for pop-ups and driveway burgers can be traced to the transitional nature of post-quake life. “We’ve had to be open to all sorts of new ways of getting together, and we got really used to meeting in garages,” laughs Peach.
Also the owner of Frances Nation, Peach opened her new site in Linwood just two months ago in an old office space. “I live around here, and I just got quite taken by the idea that it would be great to start a neighbourhood cafe,” she says. While she had a lot of support, she did also encounter some surprising snobbery about the location. “There’s all these old, really outdated ideas about parts of Christchurch, but we’re not in the 90s any more – we’re actually in the most drastically changing city in New Zealand. It’s a good buzz, and there’s a tonne of opportunity.”
The drift of hospitality businesses to more city-fringe and industrial areas in Christchurch also means cheaper rent. “You literally step outside of the Four Aves and the price is so different that it’s actually insane,” says Collis in Sydenham. Barker agrees. “I definitely pay a lot less because I’m a shipping container in a warehouse,” he laughs. “Whereas the overheads on the CBD seem to be a big issue for everyone. Even when they’re doing really well, it’s really expensive to rent in Riverside or Little High, or anywhere else in the middle of town.”
And with Christchurch being still a relatively small and cycle-friendly place, everyone agrees that operating a hospitality business outside the CBD doesn’t mean you are far away from anything. Peaches may be in – gasp – Linwood, but it is also on the Puari ki Rapanui cycleway, which means you can always find one or two bikes parked up outside. As for everywhere else? “You can get pretty much anywhere you need to be within 20 or 25 minutes,” says Baker. “So that also means it is never hard to get to someone else’s spot and help them out if they need it.”
Indeed, later that night, Baker’s callout for help would again prove his thesis about Christchurch’s “weirdly, weirdly, weirdly friendly” hospitality community. With Papa’s regular staff still knocked out with sickness, Collis from Grumpy’s abandoned his last-minute shop finishings across the warehouse to prep all the onions and pickles for the burgers, and Mark Sanders from Lo-Fi Burgers jumped behind the grill despite, on paper, being Papa’s direct competitor. They sold out within a couple of hours.
“Chch whānau,” Baker posted later on his Instagram story, “so thankful.”
