A culinary love story: Tony Astle remembers Antoine’s and wife Beth

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Let Them Eat Tripe: The Story of Antoine’s by Tony Astle with Geraldine Johns (Bateman, $45). Photo / supplied

In December 2020, after 49 years, the Auckland culinary institution that was Antoine’s quietly closed the doors at 333 Parnell Rd after its final service. The love child of Tony and Beth Astle, the restaurant had survived the early years of breaking new ground in a city largely bereft of
fine-dining options, numerous recessions, one era-defining stock-market crash, the launch of a plethora of other eateries that often came and went, and finally Covid.

There was no specific financial reason for the closure. Antoine’s was, Astle says, still doing just fine, largely due to its faithful regulars. However, his adored wife Beth was in the final stages of her battle with cancer and being at home with her had suddenly become far more precious than the countless hours he had habitually put in at Antoine’s for close to half a century. People throw around words like “iconic” far too loosely these days, but Antoine’s was exactly that, and its closure, to use another much overused phrase, was undoubtedly an “end of an era”.
Let Them Eat Tripe is a ghost-written anecdotal history of the restaurant and a personal memoir that gallops along at pace. It’s an absolute credit to ghost writer Geraldine Johns that the book feels like Astle’s authentic voice, so light is her touch. There’s no fill or blather as Astle – who is, I suspect, a consummate storyteller – regales the reader via Johns with the best gossip the restaurant has in its archival history.
These stories have a well-polished feel, which suggests Astle has told them countless times while sitting at his beloved Table 7 at Antoine’s, looking out over the courtyard with a cigarette in one hand and a glass of champagne in the other. Always funny, occasionally shocking, including that incident with his hand and a meat grinder, and a frank disclosure about his eating disorder, Let Them Eat Tripe is everything you want a book like this to be, with gallons of champagne and Petrus to wash it all down. It’s also a name-dropper’s paradise, with international luminaries such as Rita Hayworth, Joan Collins, Elton John, Roger Moore, the band Queen, Quincy Jones and Prince Philip – sans ER, as she was suffering a gastrointestinal upset and stayed onboard Britannia – dining at No 333 over the years.
But before the book gets to the gossip and the excesses of the 80s in particular, it begins rather humbly in a working-class suburban kitchen in north New Brighton, Christchurch. Astle started his culinary journey cooking the family’s Sunday roast, which got him out of going to church, and whipping up batches of pikelets.
Though academically inclined enough to get a scholarship at Shirley Boys’ High School, Astle was a “disruptive little prick” and this, combined with a few run-ins with a terrible teacher with a taste for abusing boys in his charge, saw Astle leave school before he was 16.
He began working at a restaurant in Wellington called Le Normandie, which proved to be a baptism of blood, his own, and an introduction to shonky kitchen practices that Astle definitely didn’t take on board. In fact, the shonky kitchen practices would be the reason he lost part of two fingers, having been, as a trainee chef, put in charge of grinding leftovers, including those from people’s plates, into mince for meatloaf. In an attempt to halt this practice, he dropped a big bone into the meat grinder, and when it jammed the mechanism, he made the error of going after it with his hand while the grinder was still doing its thing.
Although Let Them Eat Tripe is ostensibly a memoir about a restaurant that was at the forefront of Auckland turning into a city of what feels like a million eateries, at its heart it’s a love letter to Beth, who died in March 2021.
The couple met during one of Astle’s stints back in Christchurch when he was between kitchen jobs and running a dairy with one of his brothers. He was very taken with Beth, a hairdresser who occasionally helped out at the dairy, and he very sensibly pursued her and ultimately convinced her to marry him.
There’s no doubt she was absolutely the love of his life, with Antoine’s running a very close second. Beth resonates off every page, the proverbial calming oil on Astle’s stormy seas, the saint to his sinner and a de facto mum and loyal friend to many of the staff who passed through their restaurant over the years.
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