The Coffee Kings

We celebrate 20 years of coffee roasting in Wellington by sitting down with the industry’s pioneers.by Nick Churchouse, photography by Victoria Vincent
Three wise men. They like that.

Geoff Marsland beams, proclaiming it a great headline for an article about 20 years of Wellington coffee, and looking to his coffee buddies for a laugh. Chris Dillon smiles wryly, and Jeff Kennedy didn’t hear him. He’s thinking about something else. The three coffee dons know each other well enough, with two decades of wrangling with each other over the capital’s evolving caffeine habit.

Marsland runs Havana Coffee. He also wears red boots, big chunky rings and balances a carefree joker attitude with a hardcore skull-cracker reputation. Not everyone thinks he’s a nice guy. But for all the bravado and braying, he clearly looks up to the current company. A decade or so younger than Kennedy and Dillon, he is the little brother in the trio… but only by age.

Kennedy started Caffe L’Affare in College Street around the same time as Marsland opened his first Havana café, Midnight Espresso. Both still operate at the same locations they did 20 years ago. Dillon came onto the scene a couple of years later with Supreme Coffee.

Who came first, and who pioneered what, is apparently still arguable.

“I started a café before L’Affare. We owned Midnight Espresso, then Deluxe, and then L’Affare opened after that,” Marsland says.

“That’s right. When Midnight and The Lido were going, there was a critical mass…” Dillon remembers.

“But Lido came later though.”

“Did Lido come after… or before?”

“What about Toad Hall?” Kennedy butts in, taking things off on a tangent.

“Are we talking 20 years or 30 years?”

“Have you seen the new deli in Lyall Bay?”

Getting a straightforward conversation between the three guys that founded Wellington’s coffee culture is about as likely as finding three Wellingtonians that can agree on who has the best beans.

With 30 years in Wellington hospitality, Kennedy is roundly given the nod as the longest serving of the three. An eccentric gaze fronts an obviously eccentric mind, such that a recent tribute in support of a lifetime achievement award from the New Zealand Coffee Roasters’ Association tagged him fairly comprehensively as mad.

Apparently in coffee it helps.

The trio are about as diverse in personality as in their dress sense, but they all agree on one thing. The coffee came second.

“The cafés came first and the coffee wasn’t good,” Marsland says.

“You started the café before you started roasting,” Dillon explains before turning to Kennedy: “You started roasting at the same time, didn’t you?”

“No, no… you had a café before you were roasting too,” Marsland answers for Kennedy, who is looking at the ceiling, trying to figure it all out.

“Didn’t I start at the same time?”

“No, you had the café but it didn’t work because you were selling knives and Birkenstocks and all that. And we said, ‘No one’s roasting good coffee in Wellington, so why don’t you roast good coffee?’”

Kennedy stops thinking. “I think that’s the way it went. There was definitely a real interest in trying to roast better and better coffee.”

Marsland wants to confirm he is right before moving on. “The cafés came first though.” Two nods.

As it transpires, what really came first was booze. Illegitimate booze. Kennedy describes the “archaic licensing laws” from his early days of running restaurants; the real reason teahouses became cafés as we know them today.

Peering over his glasses like a history teacher, Dillon has clearly told this story before. “The café explosion, and the hospitality explosion, happened as a direct result of the third Labour government in 1984.” He paints a New Zealand dressed in uniform denim jeans and Bata Bullets, stifled by overregulation, heavy import duties and an impenetrable old boys’ network.

“We were locked up like a country behind the iron curtain, and then those shackles were thrown off. Entrepreneurship took off and that’s how hospitality got going. We wouldn’t have the coffee scene we have now without the social changes we saw in the 1980s.”

Social change is another way to describe the evolution of a double-shot trim macchiato poured halfway and other such ridiculous café orders.

The first coffees were done with a nip from a bottle behind the counter, Marsland admits. “The time we really took off with Midnight Espresso was the same time as when you could only drink alcohol after 10.00pm in a nightclub and you had to wear certain shoes and stuff. We wanted somewhere we could go late at night, drink coffee, eat cake and talk about things. But we became a real success when we started selling special coffees.”

And the hazy line of liquor licensing back then?

“It wasn’t illegal, but it’s still a grey area that’s never been tested.”

As they say, history is written by those that won. Special coffees were legit, and Havana definitely won. Kennedy and Dillon both built their own bean-fuelled empires, but pay respect to the difference Marsland’s bullish run has made to Cuba Street.

“It’s almost a joint brand, Cuba and Havana,” Kennedy remarks, without a drop of irony.

The three roasting mavens bounce off each other in the same way that three odd-shaped balls might; a bit unpredictable but bouncing all the same. Two decades of “dancing round each other,” as Dillon puts it, pretty much qualifies you as dance partners of sorts.

While the steps might be similar, each of the coffee houses takes a different line on the floor and trip out to a different beat. It’s the trio’s tagline, stereotyping their own customers.

Havana’s for the revolutionaries, the grunge set and the students.

Supreme is for ‘nobs’ and society types, with their Range Rovers and automatic gates.

L’Affare is for the proletariat, Kennedy claims, prompting Marsland to scoff and remind him he has just sold up to the Japanese-owned Cerebos Group.

The jokes are clearly still funny now, but Dillon points out that, while a bit of a dag, the way people identify with coffee brands is a fascinating social phenomenon. “Even up to the mid 1990s, it didn’t exist. But by the end of the decade, there was distinct brand awareness in Wellington.”

Kennedy shakes his head in amused disbelief, “I’ve actually heard it said, ‘I’m a Supreme person.’” He straightens up, a serious furrow replacing the grin. “Coffee is more than just a drink. Coffee as a social machine has had a big influence on Wellington. It’s not alcoholic, it’s unthreatening, and both men and women can engage in it. You think anthropologically about the influence of coffee in Wellington; think how much safer the streets are because there are people sitting outside exuding safety.”

“Cafés; they are hives of activity. ‘Would you like to come to my office?’ No one says that anymore. Now it’s all laptop and talk at the café. We could compare it to Walter Raleigh introducing the cigarette. It’s taken on like wildfire. From sitting in a dark café in Paris, it’s now everywhere. People have it walking down the street. You only have two hands – one for a cell phone, the other for a coffee.”

This is the phenomenon that made these guys rich and famous. And it gets their steam up. Marsland goes next.

“Now people want coffee everywhere. They want it in their garden centres, they want it at their service stations, their dentist surgeries, and they want it at home. It’s got to the stage where I get phone calls from people that want it for the hardware store and the hairdresser. Everybody thinks coffee is the magic formula now. It’s embarrassing.”

The statistic that gets bandied about is that Wellington has more cafés per capita than any other city in the world. Everyone has a favourite; there’s one for every mood and most people will profess to know where’s best.

Supreme, Havana and L’Affare beans dot the café benches citywide, but the new tranche of Wellington coffee roasters are making their mark: Peoples, Mojo, Celcius and Ripe. Some are young, but all are established. Fuel Espresso, born in the 1990s, is getting on in vintage. Emporio started 10 years ago. Iconic café destinations like Astoria on Midland Park and Aro Café roast their own. And then there are the imports.

There’s enough for everyone and the latte dollar is an easy win, it seems. But it’s an illusion, Dillon says. “They think that by having coffee there, they will inject some culture, energy and coolness into their business, and make more people want to come in and buy their hose. It’s just not true, of course.”

When Kennedy opened L’Affare, he reckons 90% of New Zealand drank instant. Now only 70% do. Is the blossoming coffee trade big enough for the 146 roasters now bagging beans around the country?

The economics work for the big boys, with Marsland estimating a good café regular will bring in $80 a week on coffee alone. But it’s not as easy to make a buck as it once was.

“We were all fortunate to start when we did, rather than now,” Dillon says. “It’s hard yards. And it’s harder and harder to make money in coffee now.” Marsland agrees. “I wouldn’t want to do it now. It’d be like getting into kiwifruit or something.”

Nonetheless, they all look fondly on the new kids on the block, all agreeing Mr Mojo, Steve Gianoutsos, has a pretty savvy business model.

Peoples boss Matt Lamason is a “lovely, lovely guy” with a clever brand. “He’s driven. Watch him,” Marsland says; an emphatic eyebrow cocked. “It’s a really clever name. People can drive round in a Range Rover, f**k the planet and then think that if they buy 200 grams of Peoples that they’re doing their bit. It gives people the ‘feel good’ factor.”

It’s hard to tell whether he’s impressed or pissed off he didn’t think of it first.

The not-so-new founder of Fuel Espresso, Sanjay Popanna, is a bit of a mystery, but a successful one.

“How’s he going in Hong Kong? Is he roasting up there?”

Shrugs.

Dillon recaps. In 20 years, a lot has happened. “It was a café-led culture that became roaster oriented. Then came the emergence of brands, then the understanding of the importance of the coffee makers, and then the changing business models. Now you have the incredibly competitive situation where most people who start a café – if they haven’t worked in hospitality before – cannot make a buck.”

The industry is still doing record numbers though, Marsland reports. “It still seems to be going off. There’re some new roasters that are doing quite well. Even with all the competition, it still gets busier.”

The competition has made it what it is. That and a bit of Kiwi can-do, Dillon says. “The Australian coffee industry was set up by people doing things the way they used to back home. We said we can do that too, and we can probably figure out a better way to do it. That’s the New Zealand approach, and it’s why we have the kind of industry we have now.”

“The Aussies have fluffy cappuccinos,” Kennedy chuckles. “When I go to Italy, I don’t even drink coffee.”

They all believe their own hype. Actually, so do most people if you go by the panic in Auckland when power cuts take out the espresso lines. But Dillon tries to put it back in perspective. It’s not bragging. It just is.

“This city has the best coffee in the country, and New Zealand has better coffee than most other countries. We don’t need to claim anything. We aren’t looking to be the best in the world. One of the reasons Wellington coffee is good is because we haven’t done it to beat Italy or Iceland, but because we just wanted to be really good at it. It’s a common refrain when someone returns to New Zealand: ‘Thank God I can get a decent f**cking coffee again.’”