When in Rome... or Tokoroa
Locals wanted pizza that looked ‘more like a cake’ until an Italian changed the tastes of a small town, writes Emily Brookes.
In 1984, the good citizens of Tokoroa were not eating a lot of pasta. Tokoroa was a bustling industry town then; the 1981 census had recorded its population at 18,713, and it was aiming for city status in the next one.
The town had been planned by New Zealand Forest Products (NZFP) 35 years earlier to service the Kinleith pulp and papermill, attracting workers from around New Zealand and the Pacific. There were multiple primary schools, two high schools, a hospital, a swimming pool complex, and a golf club.
There was a KFC, a couple of Chinese takeaways, and the Tokoroa Working Men’s Club, where everything came with a side of chips and iceberg lettuce with cheese squares, and a pineapple ring on your ham steak was the height of sophistication.
Butwhen Italian immigrant Alberico D’Andrea opened the doors to his eponymous restaurant at the corner of Logan and Commerce streets on April 16, 1984, European food was not seen much.
‘‘For the first six months we were giving away pasta for free to teach people how to eat pasta properly, like pappardelle with cream sauce or ribbon noodle with cream sauce,’’ D’Andrea, now nearly 70, recalled.
‘‘We were setting out side dishes for free. Slowly, slowly the ladies started eating the pasta, and then it became one of the most popular dishes in the restaurant.’’
The ladies were important in those early days, his wife, Rachel D’Andrea, 68, said. ‘‘I was fielding lots of phone calls from ladies who would say, ‘I’d like to come eat at your place but my husband will only eat steak. Do you have steak on the menu?’’’
They did, but they weren’t cooking it the way the locals expected.
‘‘The steak had to be really well done,’’ Alberico said. ‘‘A lot of people [were] surprised I didn’t serve eggs on the plate.’’
Although Alberico would cook meat well done if customers insisted, he worked on convincing them to try a shorter grill and eventually won them over. ‘‘Now it’s very, very rare that somebody comes and asks for awelldone steak in this restaurant,’’ he said, laughing, ‘‘because they know that I give them the evil eyes.’’
He’d leave the garlic out if a customer put their foot down, but drew the line at thick-based pizza.
‘‘At the time pizzawas about three inches high. It looked more like a cake than a pizza,’’ Alberico said.
‘‘I was totally against it and I wanted people to eat thin pizza. They said ‘nah, nah – wewant thick pizza.’ I said, ‘go and eat it somewhere else! I’m not going to make this.’’’
Nearly 37 years later, Alberico’s has gone from being a cultural oddity to one of Tokoroa’s most beloved institutions. It’s seen the town through boom and near bust, and seen a swath of other eateries come and go.
The story of how Alberico D’Andrea came to open an authentic Italian restaurant in themost unlikely of places is, like so many, one of chance and circumstance.
Alberico came toNew Zealand in 1969 to work as a cook at the Tongariro Hydroelectric Power
Project. He met Rachel, a Bay of Plenty girl then at teachers’ college, on a blind date and, after they married, they thought they would settle near Rachel’s family in Edgecumbe, even buying a commercial building there that they planned to convert into a restaurant.
When they came to beginning modifications, however, there was some bad news: Their lawyer hadn’t checked the town zoning laws and they weren’t allowed to open a restaurant on that site.
‘‘I was unemployed [with] not much money left around because I’d invested already in the building, and a friend ofmine was coming back from Hamilton,’’ Alberico said.
‘‘He stopped in Tokoroa and saw the restaurant for sale and ... he came to see me to say, ‘there’s a nice little restaurant about the right price for you in Tokoroa.’’’
Alberico travelled down and, over a round of golf, chatted to a few locals.
‘‘They seemed pretty interested to have an Italian restaurant and I thought, ‘Why not?’’’ Alberico hails from Treviso, in the northern Italian region of Veneto, the home of radicchio, risotto, risi e bisi, and tiramisu. Chestnuts, pigeonmeat and asparagus feature in well-known local dishes.
In 1984, those things weren’t easy to come by. ‘‘The biggest problemwas to get very good pasta. There was no Italian pasta available in New Zealand,’’ Alberico said.
One day soon after arriving in Tokoroa, he discovered some Greek pasta at the town’sWoolworths.
‘‘It was the first time I had seen Greek spaghetti but I tasted it and [it was] as good as the Italian one.
‘‘I asked the manager how many packets he had sold – he said one or two. ‘‘I say, ‘how much have you got here?’ He says about a thousand dollars worth.
‘‘I say, ‘and how much all over New Zealand?’ He rang around. They’ve got $6000 worth of spaghetti all over New Zealand.
‘‘And I say, ‘can you bring it all to Tokoroa?’ He says, ‘are you joking?’
‘‘I say, ‘no no no, bring it all. We buy it all!’ It was almost a truckload.’’
There were a handful of others who had left the Tongariro project to open restaurants around the central North Island, in places such as Taihape, Waio¯uru and Tu¯rangi. They kept in touch and would share intel on hardto-source ingredients.
Over time Alberico’s became ingrained in the fabric of Tokoroa life. ‘‘We’ve definitely had [a] third generation through,’’ Rachel said.
It’s seen weddings and wakes, and hosted special guests.
A standout memory for the couple is the time opera star Shaun Dixon came to sing for their anniversary.
He and the D’Andreas’ son, Leandro, a trained actor, had been performing together in Auckland.
‘‘They had mooted the point that we’d like to have him come sing at the restaurant, and he had mooted the point that he’d like to have one of Alberico’s spaghetti carbonaras.’’
It wasn’t until after Dixon had found space in his schedule and the datewas set, that they realised it was Good Friday, Rachel said.
‘‘I thought, ‘Oh my goodness! Is anybody going to come?’ And Alberico said, ‘It doesn’t matter if he sings only for me and I cook only for him.’’’
The crowd wound up overflowing out the door and on to the footpath.
Today, Alberico remembers it as ‘‘probably the highlight of my 36 years’’.
Anyone who doubts the restaurant’s place in the Tokoroa community need only look at the large mural painted on one interior wall. What started as a special request from a loyal customer and good friend to be painted next to his regular seat became a painting incorporating dozens of residents.
‘‘As we start putting people in it our customers come in saying, ‘oh, would you mind to put me in it?’’’ Alberico said, laughing. ‘‘You couldn’t say no.’’
It’s a snapshot of a small New Zealand town, albeit depicted against an Italian backdrop, in 1998.
That small town has gone through a lot of changes in the past four decades. History will note that Alberico’s opened its doors at what
would prove to be the tail end of Tokoroa’s mill town glory years.
It would never reach the 20,000 people required for city status.
‘‘As soon as I arrive, they decide to run away,’’ Alberico joked.
In fact, the early 1980s marked the beginning of downscaling and restructures at Kinleith that would see the jobs for which the town had been established disappear.
Tokoroa had a few bad years in there. Far from the thriving, mostly blue-collar, middle-class town it once was, it became known for crime, drugs, and even murder. There was trouble with gangs.
Opportunities were few and the population dropped to a low of about 12,000 people in 2013.
With the people went retailers, amenities, and, of course, restaurants.
But now, there are signs it is back on the up. The population has crept back up to more than 13,500, based in large part on geography. Tokoroa is about an hour’s drive on State Highway 1 fromHamilton, about 45 minutes from Taupo¯; with today’s housing issues, that’s appealing.
Of course, that means property prices in Tokoroa itself are going up, too. Prices in the South Waikato District – more than 50 per cent of the region lives in Tokoroa – are among the fastest-rising in the country.
A $4million upgrade of the main drag, Leigh Place, should be complete early this year, and new business initiatives are emerging.
Tokoroa is very special to the D’Andreas. ‘‘Tokoroa is such a nice place, such a friendly place,’’ Alberico said. ‘‘It’s hard to imagine a place as friendly as Tokoroa is, despite the reputation it has built up over the years.’’
The town that just happened to have a restaurant site going has captured this Italian’s heart.
‘‘It’s not only me who has done a favour to Tokoroa – a favour by coming here to cook,’’ he said.
‘‘It’s them who have managed to keep me here for a long time.’’
At 36, Alberico’s – the authentic Italian restaurant in the little town in the South Waikato – is one of the longest-running restaurants in New Zealand.
Through all those years, it has remained pretty much the same. The menu – ofmore than 50 items – hasn’t changed at all since 2011, and barely before that. Many items, including the scallopine di pollo, are undying favourites, while the shrimp cocktail, in all its retro glory, was initially popular, went through a dip, and has come back again.
There is a not-insignificant number of locals who have been eating at Alberico’s every few months for 36 years and ordered exactly the same thing, every time.
The thing about the restaurant that has changed is the proprietors.
They’ve aged. ‘‘I’ve been here too long. I’m almost a dinosaur,’’ Alberico said. ‘‘I’m a fossil ready to go in the museum.’’
He has an ongoing heart condition, and isn’t up to working long hours in the kitchen any more. Rachel, who has run the front of house all these years, is also starting to feel her age.
Leandro, 40, has recently come back from overseas, but the plan isn’t for him to take over operations. The restaurant is officially on the market.
‘‘He is here to ensure the continuity of the restaurant while we are in the process of finding the special person or family who would love to take over the reins of our establishment and make that transition as smooth as possible – both for them and us,’’ Rachel said.
What exactly that transition will look like isn’t yet clear, but the D’Andreas are determined that Alberico’swill remain.