Love thy neighbour
For The Daily Cafe’s Chrissi and Marty Robinson, a winning cafe formula goes well beyond the menu.
Chrissi Robinson knows all too well that charity starts in your own backyard. The passionate Te Puke resident and cafeowner has carved a career out of rallying around her town and supporting families in need – all the while managing to serve seriously good coffee while she’s at it.
SERVING AND DESERVING
“We couldn’t believe it, honestly – it came as a total surprise,” says The Daily Cafe trustee, following their Meadow Fresh New Zealand Café of The Year win in Auckland last month. “We’d just won the Best Regional Town category and we were thinking ‘wow, that’s great’ – next minute, there were PR people behind us, shuffling us forward to accept the big prize. It was incredibly humbling.”
The focus of Chrissi and her husband, Marty, alongside fellow trustees Richard Crawford and Andrew Reid, is on making the local community better, serving Te Puke and promoting goodness to grow, at home and beyond.
“Tucked away just off the Te Puke highway, sits one of the most interesting cafes we came across,” says Café of The Year judge and food critic Kerry Tyack. “Its cheekiness brings an immediate smile as you approach through an outdoor seating area into a vast mélange of mismatched seating. The service is coordinated and uncomplicated. The sweet and savoury fare is homemade and certainly tasty. When the food and coffee arrive, you know someone in the kitchen knows how to satisfy a Kiwi appetite with generous portions.”
Yet the winning cafe formula goes well beyond enlisting a great barista and showcasing an ever-rotating line-up of cabinet food. The duo, alongside a line-up of Te Puke board members, operate the cafe as a not-forprofit social initiative, embedded in every aspect of the community.
“The idea started about six or seven years ago. My husband came up with the idea of a charitable cafe,” says Chrissi. “The town struggled; the kiwifruit crisis really hurt us, we all struggled. So, we put [the idea] on the backburner for quite a while. It was a lovely chaos; we would have a pizza night at our house, once a week.
“I would do the dough and people would bring different toppings, there wasn’t a lot of money going around the town back then. We shared the concept we’d been thinking about with our regulars. A lot of them are on the trust now,” she says.