After nearly five decades of Antoine’s, a popular Auckland restaurant, Founder Tony Astle closes the doors and is now sitting down to talk about his story in the new book: Let Them Eat Tripe: The Story of Antoine’s.
1973. That was the year of Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon”, the opening of the new London Bridge and the opening of Tony Astle’s restaurant in Auckland’s hot spot, Parnell.
Astle was 22 at the time, but at that age, he was already an entrepreneur.
Just before the grand opening of his long-standing restaurant, Astle was a trainee chef in Wellington but went back to Christchurch to open up dairy with his brother titled ‘Astle’s Seven Day Mini Mart’.
“We opened it and we sold everything,” he says, but later explains to me that dairies back in the days had strict rules about what can and can’t be sold.
“You weren’t allowed to sell what grocery shops and supermarkets had and they all closed at five o’clock.”
Despite the rules, Astle and his brother still decided to sell everything they could. The brothers’ store was down by the beach, which led them to sell condoms but it left them hiding the stock under the bed because “it was totally illegal to sell things like that”.
Astle would open the store at six in the morning and work all day, before heading off to his part-time job, which was cooking for a restaurant in the night.
And that was what ignited Astle’s passion for the world of cooking, where after 18 months of running the dairy, he moved to Wellington to work at the Coachman restaurant, which he moved with his wife and partner.
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But after a while, Astle, being the nomad his is, was then motivated to move to Auckland and open the doors to his very own restaurant, Antoine’s, a twist on French cuisine.
He opened the restaurant thanks to another entrepreneur, Gordon Pollock, who gave him $70,000 to kickstart Antoine’s.
“It was such a huge success that we paid it off in about six months,” says Astle.
At the height of the restaurant’s success in the 1980s, Antoine’s was booked out for lunch and dinner six days a week for months in advance and international celebrities, politicians and dignitaries visited whenever they were in town.
Antoine’s was a place where patrons had to ring a doorbell and be vetted prior to entry. Customers were barred entry for wearing inappropriate clothing. Diners spent thousands on dinners and wine was sold for up to $20,000 a bottle.
The secret to Antoine’s near 50 years of success was Astle’s wife, Beth.
“Luckily Beth and I, we were a team. She ran the front and I ran the back and she would start six o’clock in the morning,” he says.
“It is a commitment.”
The most important aspect of Antoine’s was the customers, and both Astle and Beth tried their best to keep them at the forefront.
It was what kept them in business; loyal customers who loved the restaurant and kept coming back to them.
“The customers loved her because she is not like me where I’m a brash sort of tell it all and snap at people. She was the most diplomatic person in the whole world,” he says.
Astle says it was important to get to know his customers, whether they had been coming for years or only a month, it was the people who kept the restaurant afloat and saw it as their home too.
“The first thing we learned was you’ve got to be nice to people,” he adds.
For the aspiring restaurateurs, Astle says that is the main thing to remember: opening up a restaurant is not easy, but being nice to people is.
