Loyal customers keep cafe going
Frosty mornings and a lack of indoor seating did not stop loyal customers of a popular Christchurch cafe from calling in for a coffee while the owners fought for months for permanent consent to stay put.
Upshot Coffee, nestled in Christchurch’s Heathcote Valley, was threatened with closure due to council red tape before its resource consent finally came through earlier this year.
‘‘I was dumbfounded,’’ coowner Megan Geels said. ‘‘Bloody fantastic news.’’
Upshot Coffee moved to its location on Bridle Path Rd after the 2011 earthquakes, attracting residents from all over Heathcote Valley, Mt Pleasant and Lyttelton, as well as passing police, firefighters and tradies. It had become a community hub over the years, Geels previously said.
A decision to apply for resource consent was a costly one, but a chance to stay meant a chance for Geels and her business partner and co-owner Justin Good to maintain their livelihoods.
Before the quakes, Upshot Coffee was located on nearby Station Rd, where Geels and Good ran the cafe for about seven years. The pair dragged the coffee machine on to the street to keep serving coffee after the building was demolished. They later moved to their current space, next to the horse-riding school and an old dairy farm building, and put the coffee bean roastery in an outbuilding.
But the cafe’s future was left uncertain after its temporary permit expired at the end of June last year.
A petition at the time attracted more than 2000 signatures in support of the cafe staying at the site, while surveyor and land development consultant David Fox paid for a planner to help with the campaign. He also contributed thousands of dollars for the resource consent application as well as a pre-application meeting, when it was indicated that an approval for consent was unlikely.
‘‘At the outset, the odds were stacked against us,’’ Good said. ‘‘There was certainly no guarantee that we would get a successful outcome.’’
Fox was passionate about keeping the cafe in its place, describing it as ‘‘one of the gems’’ in Heathcote Valley. ‘‘We were blessed to have a team of people with the right skills to get the process through, raising funds and encouraging us,’’ Good said.
After months of uncertainty, and 10 weeks of closure while the owners applied for temporary consent at the end of last year, a decision to approve their application came back at the end of March.
Good said it was ‘‘a big relief’’, although he was always confident that the application would go through because of what the cafe meant for the community.
‘‘We’ve got our livelihoods back.’’
Geels said it was the community support and loyal customers that kept her going during the process. ‘‘They were awesome.’’
Now that they had some breathing space, the owners are looking for new staff, and hope to add accessible toilets to be able to adhere with building compliance to become a dine-in cafe.