La Cimbali, 5,000 shoes and a new cafe

Well, I must say I am bowled over by all the comments and feedback I have received. It’s great to read so many positive, happy memories of DKD. It really was, in my opinion, the start of something new and a way of doing something outside the corporate-style culture that was becoming so pervasive at the time. I’ve been having a think about what to write about next, there are so many stories from DKD, as well as general coffee yarns. I know many people are itching to hear what the name DKD stood for – and yes, I did once say it stood for Decadence Kills Depression during a TV interview on Kaleidoscope, but I’d be misleading you if I said that was the true meaning. Still – I’ll save that one and start with the story behind something that was the heart of DKD – the gold and chrome La Cimbali Un Cimbalino two group machine.

When I was 13 or 14 I used to hang out in an Italian restaurant (the name escapes me at the moment – thoughts?) on Victoria Street. It featured the spectacular La Cimbali machine, which dated from the mid 1950s. Years later, when I was thinking about starting a cafe, I wondered what had happened to it. Turns out it was sitting in a shed – no longer working. I decided to buy it from Atillo, one of the owners for the princely sum of $400.

Of course, having a broken-down coffee machine in New Zealand in that time was far more of a problem than it is now – there were no repair guys, and I wasn’t engineering-minded. DKD didn’t open for around 15 months after I bought it, so we had a bit of time to use the trial-and-error technique to get it working. It really was a work-of-art, an extraordinary thing, and once I had bought that machine, the cafe just had to happen.

I had no money at the time, but there was a real subculture running in Auckland, and I was part of that. Ken Neale was a men’s outfitter with a shop at the Cook Street markets – dealing in 40s and 50s clothes. At one stage he lived in the old Hat Factory in High Street – back then it was pretty much illegal to live in the central city, but plenty of people did it and installed showers and kitchens to make them liveable. Ken then took over the lease of the space that was to become DKDs. It had been vacant since the 1920s and was owned by Amalgamated Cinemas, which owned the Civic.

The first time I went into the space it was filled with shoes – 2,500 pairs of, what I think, were ex-Navy shoes. Quite amazing. They were lined up in sizes throughout the whole place. Ken was thinking of living there, and was only paying $12 a week rent. We got the space off him, and because the rent could only go up a maximum of something like 10% a year, meant that after DKD was open for 10 years we were still only paying something like $90 a week.

It took a bit of talking to get the boss of Amalgamated Cinemas Joe Moodabe to agree, but he finally did. I can see why he was a little concerned. From the cafe you could get into the Civic, go through a trapdoor into the old boxes, and even get through the bowels of the building and see into the old Wintergarden kitchens – which were under a metre of water, flooded by the river that runs under the theatre.

It took nine months to prepare the space, some plastering lessons so we could fill in the holes, dozens of trips to junk shops to get the Formica tables and chairs we needed.

We also painted it 25 different shades of blue, but this was what made DKD what it was.

OK, better sign off, hope that bought back a few memories. I’m pretty keen to talk about our original coffee blends and the changing palate of coffee drinkers in New Zealand, but that will have to wait. Cheers.