Award-winning Dunedin cafe Dog With Two Tails had its inception on a masseuse’s table in South America. Rebecca Fox discovers its owner’s varied trail to cafe ownership.
Chris Wilson was loving life.
He was travelling, having a great time, busking and selling and making some crafts along the way.
Only, at 33, Wilson realised that while he was having fun, he had not built anything in his life nor did he have any connections with a community.
‘‘I loved it but it’s not the healthiest.’’
He had just finished a stint as a volunteer nurse in Guatemala and had joined up with a mountain-guide friend to climb a volcano in Chile.
‘‘We came down very sore so he recommended this lady masseuse. So I had my head in the hole, you know, on the table and these ideas start coming at me of this train running around a cafe.
‘‘I started to get really excited; these ideas about building a cafe kept coming and I thought this is something I could do.’’
So Wilson, who was brought up in Dunedin, returned to live in Nelson and set about making his ideas become reality.
However, a trip back home to Dunedin for a ‘‘very good party’’ changed his path.
‘‘I realised how much I love it here and how many friends I had here.’’
The final nail in Nelson’s coffin came when he saw the building in Moray Pl where the cafe is housed lit up at night.
‘‘I realised I could make a really warm, cosy cafe here.’’
It was quite a stretch to go from itinerant traveller and occasional nurse to cafe owner, but in his favour, he did know how to operate a coffee machine. His brother owns cafes in Edinburgh and Kuala Lumpur, where he had done short stints over the years.
Aware of the gaps in his knowledge, Wilson brought in the experts to help him create the cafe he had in mind — complete with a train running around the room at picture-rail height.
He also filled it with finds from second-hand shops and auction houses, determined that everything in the cafe came with a story — such as the ship’s wheel from a wreck off the coast of Bluff.
‘‘It was very important to reach a broad demographic so everyone feels welcome and I’m happy that I’ve achieved that.’’
The name of the cafe came from a saying in Chile, a country he had lived in for five years on and off, beginning as an exchange student in his last year of high school.
It began his love affair with South America as a whole.
‘‘It’s very free. It is a wild, exciting place — well, it was when I first went there 20 years ago now.’’
He returned to New Zealand when he was 22 and decided to train as a nurse.
‘‘I sort of fell into nursing as I wanted to do something I could travel with.’’
After graduating, Wilson spent a few months at Dunedin Hospital before moving into psychiatric nursing for a year.
He soon headed off overseas and, apart from his stint in Guatemala, has not worked as a nurse again. ‘‘It’s never been my career as such.’’
So taking up cafe ownership is not too much of a departure, he reckons.
Having only been in business for two years, it was a surprise to win Hospitality New Zealand’s Awards for Excellence best cafe award.
‘‘It’s been very hard work. The first year was very difficult.’’
The independent panel of judges (who considered staff training, customer service, food and beverages, marketing and business growth) called the fun and friendly cafe ‘‘an outstanding little gem’’ that ‘‘not only delivered the very best coffee, but exemplary food and service’’.
Those words meant a lot to him as he prided himself on creating an environment in which he and his staff enjoyed working, he said.
‘‘The staff are family. We socialise together and they are attached to the place, care about quality.’’
He believed creating a culture that encouraged staff to stay would pay off as training new staff was expensive and time-consuming.
‘‘Why people would treat staff badly doesn’t make any sense to me.’’
The ‘‘best coffee’’ comment was also appreciated, as he imports his beans and gets them roasted by contracting out the work to Jason Moore of Vanguard Speciality Coffee Co.
‘‘It’s more labour-intensive but I don’t think we would have survived if we had to buy in coffee.’’
While it required a large financial outlay at the start as the cafe had to import one tonne at a time, in the long run it saved money, he said.
The cafe’s emphasis on providing a venue for musicians, poets and actors to perform had created a thriving community.
‘‘We’ve got a cultural hub with live music, a poetry night — the community have been very supportive.’’
With the decrease in live music venues in the city, he hoped to continue to provide an intimate venue for that.
In an industry which saw many doors close in the first few years, he planned not to become a statistic and the prospect of ‘‘looming debt’’ was enough of a motivator — that and the interests of his staff.
