“It was something like ten or eleven years ago. I was lost and lonely, working as a cook, living in an old motel (The Carillon) in Mount Cook in Wellington, and trying to be a writer. I didn’t have time or will for washing my clothes at the motel, so every Monday on my day off I would walk to Newtown, leave my stuff at a laundry nearby and go to have a coffee at Baobab café. There was an eatery called Manon at the back of an alleyway in front of the cafe. I would spy the restaurant from the little window thinking how cute it was. Manon eventually closed down and the place seemed to be abandoned for years. The place looked as old as it could be in Europe, and decadent and bohemian as all the things I loved.

Few years went by and life took over. I married a beautiful Chilean girl who used to cook with me and call me “dictator!”, I learned to speak Spanish like a Chilean, I stopped writing bull… and I got into running some Italian kitchen in town at Mariluca first and then Ombra. Then my friend Luis who runs Viva Mexico next door, passed me the contact of the landlord of that old place in Newtown. The landlord was an old man in an old house in Oriental Bay. He loved that restaurant more than anything he had and he always dreamt to bring it back to life, before it was too late.