The Tipping Point: The cafe that built community but couldn’t beat the numbers

Thursday, 5 March 2026

Hundreds of failed businesses shut their doors every year - but behind every closure are owners who had lofty dreams and ambitions. The Tipping Point tells their stories.

Nigel and Cathie Cottle opened Crave cafe in 2009, wanting to bring the neighbourhood together and raise the cachet of the Auckland suburb of Morningside, where they lived.

They were so successful at doing that, they ultimately attracted other businesses and high-end developers to a brand-new precinct in the area, and expanded into a second cafe. But even in a newly cool suburb, and well-designed surroundings, their second business could not survive a two-year period of economic depression in which thousands of hospitality businesses went to the wall.

Crave had grown rapidly from the initial 20-seater cafe designed to try and build a bit of a scene around a suburb that had become infamous from being the hometown of the main characters on the hit animated TV series Brotown.

“Infamous, but not cool as in ‘I want to live there’,” Nigel Cottle tells The Post.

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Crave was, and remains, a hit. So much so that star designer Nat Cheshire, the man behind iconic mixed-use developments like Britomart and the City Works Depot, decided to build a “Morningside Precinct” around 2018. The Crave crew were stoked that Morningside now had its name attached to a new development, and stoked further when they were offered first dibs on the cafe that was to be built in it, Cottle says.

Given the new cafe, called Kind, would be just 50 metres from Crave, there was the opportunity and the compulsion to do something different, even if developing a sense of community pride and opportunity still underpinned it. Making the neighbourhood “greener and healthier” was another driver, and so it was decided that the new joint would be a mostly plant-based cafe, but not didactically so - more following the diet advice of the late journalist and author Michael Pollan: “Eat food. Not too much”

Shortly thereafter came Covid, and with a renewed focus on health, and healthy eating.

Cathie Cottle left her long-time job as a teacher to run the new cafe, and the pair sold shares in the neighbourhood to those who wanted to support the venture, with Crave the majority owner (Crave’s profits are returned to the neighbourhood, so most of the profits returned to the community in one form or the other).

Vibes

There was a huge amount of optimism about the cafe and the precinct, with the view that “everything the Britomart boys touched turned to gold” says Cottle. And the site, a former carpet manufacturer, was transformed into something spectacular, including now being home to one of Auckland’s premium wedding venues.

Everyone going into the venue signed up to what Cottle says were “quite high rents” because there was a sense the development was going to pop off. The business took the usual amount of time to find its rhythm, and then, just as that happened, peak vegan started to wane.

While the business of veganism and vegetarianism boomed during Covid as health concerns peaked, economic concerns began to predominate as a cost of living crisis followed the pandemic. It started to change the food calculations at Kind, says Cottle. And food fashions evolved.

“Whereas we'd had a menu that was 80% plant based, increasingly that changed, and we realised that 70% of the items ordered were the 20% that weren’t.”

Because Kind did offer some meat, albeit at lower amounts, it did not attract the support of large numbers of the vegan community, who tend to be quite staunch about things like serving bacon as a side dish or including eggs dishes for breakfast punters.

In short, these unfortunate trends converged to make thin margins even thinner - and the economic downturn starting in 2024 delivered the coup de grȃce..

“In hospitality, there are certain [calculations] that make a business work, that might sound weird if you’re not in it. Like, rent has to be between 8% - 10% of your turnover…if rent is say 15% of your turnover, the other 5% has to come from somewhere else. You can say, we’ll just hire less staff, or pay our staff less, or get cheaper ingredients, or fewer ingredients, or make a meal smaller. There's options you have like that, but they're all things that, once you find a place of efficiency, you can't keep going down in terms of your food costs.”

2025

Kind had “survived to ‘25”, but things were not getting better, and the Cottles decided to try whatever they could to shore up the business - including trying to negotiate the rent. But that didn’t work. Cottle says the landlord was inflexible, but on the other hand, he understands why they were unwilling to yield.

The pair were asking themselves “how could 2025 get any worse” when they came to a realisation - that if rent was nudging up to a quarter of turnover, the only way to make it work was to more than double turnover. And “the economy might improve, and people might start spending more, but that’s not going to double it,” says Nigel.

“There’s fundamental things that have to change, and we had tried those, and it hadn’t changed,” he says. “The only winners would be the landlords.”

Eventually, Cottle kicked off a process of voluntary liquidation, which pre-emptively settles outstanding tax bills and pays creditors - although not the people who put money into the business to establish it, necessarily. A party was then held to celebrate the seven years the business had weathered the hospitality storm.

“When you let go of something you’re just holding on to, there’s so much energy, and it’s not good energy, it’s desperate energy,” says Cottle. “Once we closed Kind, it allowed us the freedom to focus on other things. And, the economy shifted very slightly upwards, not massively, but we didn’t need massive, we just needed some sort of positive sign.”

Crave, which had lost money for 18 of the previous 22 months, started making money again, and took part in a modest but perceptible upwards momentum in the economy that can now be seen more widely.

Although there continues to be support for the owners of Crave, the process was bittersweet. Cathie, who ran Kind, returned to teaching with some sadness about missing the sense of connection the cafe brought her and the customers. And Nigel says he is still keen to “make the world a better place” but admits being a bit gun shy about starting something bold and new.

“Kind was a proving ground of a sort, and so that failing, in that sense, and the people who put money in walking away with it, will inevitably have ramifications for the next thing that we want to try, if we are trying to push the boundaries a little bit.”