Fate keeps restaurant in family

Looking back now, it feels like fate had a very strong hand in ensuring Napier’s renowned National Cafe remained in family hands.

The small unassuming restaurant, which time forgot sometime in the sixties, sits in a purpose-built 1936 building halfway down Emerson St.

A local institution, it was known for a menu that hadn’t changed in five decades, replete with side-servings of buttered white bread and condensed milk salad dressing. And for the two elderly brothers who ran it into their eighties, Bill and Alec.

The brothers were more or less brought up in the restaurant run by their parents.

Their mother, Nicoletta, encouraged them to take the business on as their own by giving it a complete refit in the latest decor in the early sixties.

And thanks to the brothers’ unwillingness to change a thing, so it remains. Formica tables, frosted lampshades, timber panels, the lot.

When the somewhat eccentric brothers decided to hang up their aprons in 2015, they naturally forgot to tell their children, who happened by sheer chance to find out the restaurant was for sale.

As it happened, Alec’s daughter, Debbie, and her husband Kim had just returned from overseas, and were looking for an investment retail property to buy. They decided to put in an offer for the building – one of three – and they got it.

Their intention was to turn it into a retail premises, but it dawned on them that they were in possession of a piece of the city’s history.

Kim is an industrial engineer and Debbie is a teacher. She is also a very accomplished cook, but neither had any hospitality experience.

Debbie’s cousin, Lance, who had recently moved back to Napier to care for his sick dad, Bill, had plenty of hospitality experience and was very keen to reopen the old joint.

‘‘If I look back and connect the dots, it just feels inevitable that I, we, would be back in here doing this. It really did feel like it was always going to happen,’’ he said.

So they hired a chef, Glen Verner, who with Debbie’s help has mastered the Greek dishes, as well as a kitchen-hand. After giving the place a spruce-up, they re-opened on Wednesday.

‘‘I think we found out it wasn’t just our family’s restaurant. It was Napier’s restaurant.’’

As a nod to family history, they have kept some of their classic dishes. These include steak with buttered bread, plus fish and chips with a condensed milk salad dressing.