SPQR

The icon is gone

“Welcome, welcome one and all to Ponsonby Road, centre of the known universe if you're from Ponsonby and therefore don't get to the suburbs much. Or ever. And welcome to the brightest star of that sparkly universe - where the beautiful people come to get fugly - SPQR!  Starter for ten, SPQR is from the Latin for...?  Senatus Populus Que Romanus. The senate and the people of Rome. Or, because we're in Ponsonby: Sluts, Poseurs, Queers and the Rest. You'll figure out who's who in the story about to unfurl.”

Is it possible to have a relationship with a restaurant that goes beyond it being a nice place to eat and drink?

For me, for a period of time, a while ago now, SPQR was my natural habitat.  Sure, at times the service was shocking.  And yes, there were times when the food was nowhere near as good as it had been the last time we went there.  But weirdly, it always seemed to turn out that if the food was meh, then the service would be outstanding.  And vice versa.  And, no matter what, I always seemed to have fun in that concrete bunker of a building.

When my kids were youngsters they hated it when we, as a family, walked past SPQR on our strolls down Ponsonby Road.  This was because, more often than not, there would be someone the parental units would know, sitting at the outside tables and we would stop and talk, maybe even have a glass of wine, and the kids would get bored.  When you live and work in the media ghetto of Ponsonby/Grey Lynn, and all the animals tend to gather at the same watering hole, SPQR was an occupational hazard.

But the stopping and chatting thing was actually an echo of an earlier time – BC (Before Children), not long after SPQR had sprung into being.  Back then, working in The Industry, with actual disposable income, living just round the corner, SPQR was our local.

[NB: I hate the phrase The Industry, but that is what the TV and film industry calls itself.  This is possibly how the other phrase “media wankers” came into being.]

Back in what is lovingly called “the day” lunching at one of the tables outside SPQR, watching the world go by over glasses of wine and a plate of calamari, was a joyous way of passing a few hours.  And yes, there were days when lunch would morph into dinner – and beyond. Whenever this happened there would always be that moment, at the end of the night, of existential dread at the size of the bill.  Far too often, if he was with us (which he usually was) we’d go up to pay and find that our friend Craig had already picked up the tab.  Craig’s expenditure at SPQR was so horrendous I think his accountant banned him from going there. 

(The fact that Craig now lives in LA has, I think, contributed to SPQR’s financial woes.)

The first series I ever devised for television had the working title 96 Oriental Parade, because it was going to be set in Wellington.  Then TVNZ decided to set the series in Auckland so, obviously, the title needed to be changed.  The solution to this problem was obvious.  Take a pen and paper to SPQR, sit in the sunshine, drink wine and brainstorm names.  This is exactly what we did.

One of the great things about sitting at the tables outside SPQR was that, every now and then, someone you knew would wander past, stop for a chat and then maybe decide to join you.  If this happened often enough you could simply drag the tables together.

On this particular day, it seemed that everyone we knew was out and about in Ponsonby and were more than happy to join us in our quest.  By the time we were done, we had taken over all the tables outside the restaurant and the task had been forgotten in favour of much eating and much more drinking.

My favourite sub-moment on this long day’s journey into night was when a grumpy actor joined us. When he found out why we were there he grumpily recounted doing an audition for this very show.  It was clear he did not think much of the show. 

But what I knew, and he did not because his agent hadn’t been told yet, was that he had got the part in the show.  I didn’t tell him, because I was enjoying the irony too much.  He later went on to win a flash TV acting award for a script that I wrote.  And didn’t thank me in his speech.

The show ended up being called CityLife, by the way.  I think that was one of the names on the list, but for obvious reasons I can’t be sure.

I saw the most Ponsonby fight ever, outside SPQR.  A weedy little yuppie guy in a suit was fighting one of the Ponsonby itinerant population.  The yuppie guy was really really drunk. The itinerant guy was doing some sort of weird martial arts thing.  There was no chance of them ever actually hitting each other, so the only way anyone was getting hurt was if someone fell over.  What made it truly Ponsonby, though, was that they were being cheered on by two drag queens.

One New Year’s Eve, in SPQR, I entered into a wager with, among others, a singer-songwriter from a popular band.  Our task, over the next year, was to get the word “sporran” into popular culture. I have no idea why the word “sporran”, but I do know that: (a) I somehow managed to get the word “sporran” on TV but I can’t remember where or in what context; and (b) the word "sporran” appears in precisely zero Strawpeople songs.  Griffin for the win!

Sometimes actual life-affirming things would happen at SPQR.  One afternoon, on Ponsonby Road, right opposite SPQR, there was a road-rage incident. This dude pulled up behind a woman, as the traffic came to a halt, as Auckland traffic tends to do. Clearly furious about something that had transpired earlier, the dude got out of his car and attacked the wing-mirror of the woman’s car.  When he was done with that, he stalked back to his car and got behind the wheel.

Meanwhile, a bloke from another SPQR table had gotten out of his seat and crossed the road to the guy’s car.  As the guy got back into his car and slammed the door, the SPQR bloke reached through the window and removed the keys, then walked back to his table.  The woman shouted a thank you and drove off, as the traffic moved again.  Meanwhile everyone outside SPQR applauded the key-grabber, and then laughed at the ragey guy as he sat in his car and contemplated the error of his ways.

But sometimes, SPQR was a venue for things of a deeper, darker nature.  The late, great Kevin Smith and I stopped in for a whisky after a memorial service.  The service was for a colleague, a guy we had both worked with and genuinely liked.  The guy had killed himself in prison whilst remanded in custody on some very dark, very disturbing charges.  You think you know someone, then you find out about the hidden side. 

It turned out me and Kevin were not the only ones who needed a drink after that particular memorial service.  A group of us took over the table at the back, the one that you walked past on the way to the toilets.  Long into the night we discussed the nature of good and evil.  It was, understandably, a feisty discussion.

Lastly, but definitely not leastly, there was the time a bunch of us decamped to SPQR after an REM concert at Western Springs.  Full disclosure, we had smuggled a lot of alcohol into Western Springs for the astounding triple bill of Grant Lee Buffalo, Crowded House and REM.  So, by the time we reached Ponsonby Road, after the show, we were all kind of hammered.

We were sitting at one of the tables inside, in the front part of the restaurant.  At this particular time in SPQR history there were concrete bench seats at either end of this room.  I was sitting on one of these.

At some stage in proceedings that were spiralling ever downward, a couple of guys entered and sat at the window seat alongside us. A table for two. It took me a while before I realised that the guy sitting next to me, on the bench seat, was Michael Stipe, the lead singer of REM. The guy across the table from him was Grant-Lee Phillips, he of Grant Lee Buffalo.

But the important thing was MICHAEL STIPE IS SITTING RIGHT NEXT TO ME! ON A BENCH SEAT! HIS HIP IS ALMOST TOUCHING MINE!

It freaked me out.

I wanted to tell Michael how much I had enjoyed the concert and how much his music meant to me.

But I was very drunk.

But I was, deep down, sober enough to know that whatever I said, no matter how heartfelt, it would come out as: “Blarghablarghablarg!”

I did not want Michael Stipe to look at me like I was the guy who just shouted blarghablarghablarg at him.

So I curled up into an emotional ball and hoped they would go away and eventually they did.

On balance, I think it was a good choice.

But I did use the incident of the star in the night-time the last time I wrote about SPQR, before this time now. 

In the play I wrote that is set there. 

The speech at the top of this outpouring was how the first draft of the play opened, as SPQR’s flamboyant Maître d' (not very loosely based on a real person) welcomed the audience in.  I cut it from later drafts, but I figured it might work as the scene-setter here.

Yep, a whole play, set at SPQR, because that’s how engrained that place is in my psyche. 

The play has never been performed.  Which is right up there in my list of the saddest things in my so-called career.  Plays don’t come easily to me.  I fixate on them and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite, so they take for-fucking-ever until I’m happy with them. This is why I’ve written precisely three of them in my life.  The other two at least made it to the stage.  One of them has been performed all over the world and if anyone is interested in a Mandarin translation of Serial Killers, a play about a bunch of writers writing a Kiwi soap opera, I have it.

But the SPQR play never made it across the line.  So I guess now it becomes a historical document. Unless someone out there wants to stage a play set at SPQR out of a sense of nostalgia (and also because, in my humble opinion, it is a cracking good play). If so, contact Playmarket and tell them James Griffin said for you to check out the SPQR play.

So there we go.  That’s me and SPQR, done.  I will miss it a lot.

And not just because of the saltimbocca, which I ended up ordering just about every bloody time I ate there.