Being good across the board
“You can’t be up one day and down the next”

Tony Bullivant may be from Wellington, but it was Auckland he had in mind six years ago when he took over the ownership reins of Café Salsa.
“We tried to take Ponsonby Road and do it here,” he says. “Good coffees, good creative food. We wanted to do something a little bit different. Six years ago, there wasn’t a decent breakfast/brunch/lunch joint on the island.”
If previous owners had struggled, it certainly wasn’t for want of location. Café Salsa sits in the CITC Shopping Centre, a place where visitors flock to buy sunscreen or pearls or Kia Orana cards to phone home.
“We’re quite lucky here because we’ve got some great foot traffic,” says Bullivant. The addition of a front courtyard – to match the new one out back – means anyone wandering past is actually bisecting the café and so will have to struggle mightily not to be tempted by the pleasurable aromas of freshly-ground coffee or pizza hot out of a wood-burning oven.
Bullivant’s journey to Rarotonga started with a wise decision to stay connected with an old friend. More than 30 years ago, while he was doing his chef apprenticeship at the St. George Hotel, he fell in with the manager, a fellow named Jack Cooper. The same Jack Cooper, as it turned out, who would later establish Trader Jacks on the Avarua Harbour.
“I kept in touch with Jack over the years,” Bullivant says. “After I sold a catering company in Auckland, I rang him up and said, Jack, you got a job? He said, yup, come up for six months.
“I ended up working for Jack for six years.”
But Bullivant liked the feeling of being his own boss and so decided to explore other business opportunities. He opted to leave the restaurant trade behind to focus, instead, on a café-style eatery.
“I left six years to the day that I’d started at Trader Jacks and opened Café Salsa,” he says. “It was either move on (overseas) or do something on Rarotonga. And I really like the Cooks.”
Bullivant brought more than business acumen and kitchen experience with him into the new enterprise. He also brought his own chef.
Terry Tuaratini was a 14-year-old employed to clean the grounds around Trader Jacks when Bullivant first met him.
“I cracked up a bit of a relationship with him and he said he wanted to be a chef,” Bullivant relates. “So I dragged him into the kitchen and now – 12, 13 years later – he’s the head chef here. He’s worked his way up the ladder and he’s great.”
“He just looked at me and said, ah, you’re good for the job; you just seem natural to become a chef,” says Tuaratini, now 27. “From groundsman, I reported to the kitchen and started washing dishes.”
Originally from Mitiaro, Tuaratini says it was a smooth transition from preparing dinners at Trader Jacks to dealing with a menu at Café Salsa that contains nearly 25 dishes designed for daytime dining.
“It doesn’t really matter to me,” he says. “I just like cooking.”
According to Tuaratini, patience and a good attitude are the keys to being a good chef.
“Some people can’t handle the pressure,” he says. “But you just get used to it.”
While Bullivant is content to be a casual chef these days, he does work closely with Tuaratini when it comes to the menu.
“I throw the ball into Terry’s court and say, listen, we need to do a new menu, or we need to tweak up the menu,” he says. “Terry will come with his ideas and we’ll sit down over a beer and go through them.”
Ray Roumanu also works in the Café Salsa kitchen, turning out a mean Smoked Marlin Hash in the process, and his connection to Bullivant also involves a fortuitous encounter. When the two men first met at the Game Fishing Club, Roumanu was a builder’s labourer. Bullivant asked if he wanted to be a chef. The answer was yes and the two have worked together now for 10 years.
Veteran staff is all part of Bullivant’s master plan and one of the reasons why he has succeeded where previous owners stumbled.
“Surround yourself with good staff – that’s really important,” he says. “And look after them. We have a really good team here. We don’t turn staff over, we don’t have chefs leaving, or management leaving. That helps in your bid to be consistent.”
Ah, yes, consistency. That, says Bullivant, is the one element you can never emphasise enough.
“You can’t be up one day and down the next – you’ve got to be good across the board,” he says. “You only need one bad week and people talk, and that’s it: you’ve shot yourself in the foot. It’s important that we are consistent, the food is consistent, the portions are consistent. And the service is good.”
As the owner of a café, Bullivant’s focus is on daytime meals, but Café Salsa is also open late three nights a week, if only to have more time to offer its island-famous pizza. Naturally, there is a fine art to cooking this fan favourite in a wood-fired oven.
“They’ve got to be thin-based,” Bullivant points out. “You can’t have a thick base because it’s so hot in there. They’re in and out in four minutes so anything too thick or too loaded is not going to work, because it’s going to be burnt on the outside and raw in the middle.”
The live band on Saturday mornings has proven a popular attraction and, in a further attempt to add to his customers’ experience, Bullivant has made Café Salsa available as one of the venues on the Open Mike Night circuit.
The event returned to the eatery this week for the second time and Bullivant says “it worked quite well. It was a good night”.
Does that mean the host took to the stage to warble a few tunes?
Bullivant’s answer is short and to the point: “No.”

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