No coffee for me

First, what is a "café?"

Let's stick to the cheap and cheerful tag and thereby eliminate the bars and grills and brasseries and keep them for a separate section. Thus you won't find the French Café here.

The most authentic cafe in the city is Andy's Cafe which is to be found in Market Place by the city vegetable markets. There, early each weekday, you can mix with auctioneers, fruiterers, truck drivers and market gardeners and in a very small space hear perhaps 15 languages spoken. There aren't many places in Auckland where you can do that. The food is basic, eclectic, cheap and comes in very large quantities.

Up to Ponsonby and you'll find the famous Fed Up near the corner of Sumner Street and Ponsonby Road in a former Hutchinsons grocery shop. This place has had its ups and downs over the years as ownership has changed, but at the time of writing it was back in its original hands and was going through an "up" period. The food ranges from huge toasted sandwiches to excellent steaks and the rightly famous moussaka. Servings are huge and prices reasonable. The clientele is best described as "Ponsonby." Fed Up serves Auckland's best gazpacho.

Metro Guide to Auckland :
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Auckland but Didn't Know Where to Find Out!
1989, p79

So what is a "café?" It seems that, according to Warwick Roger (for it is he) in 1989, a café is place for cheap eats, in large portions and without pretension; there is no mention of coffee. The Metro Guide to Auckland was published shortly before espresso madness took over Auckland. You went to a café for nosh. On Ponsonby Road were several places where people could eat good food at little cost. The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

How different were things five years later when Grant Sheehan and David Burton produced Character Cafes of New Zealand. By then, a café was a place to take coffee; and by then, coffee was of such importance in New Zealand that it could merit a book. According to said book, Treasury issued a press statement in 1993, "expressing concern at the foreign exchange being swallowed up" by the importation of espresso machines.

I was not in Auckland at at the time, so really I am just pimping nostalgia for gentle readers who were here, but these are Warwick Roger's recommendations:

Cafe Niche
Java Jive
Cafe Iguana
Expresso Love
Ponsonby Pies
Armadillo
Mexican Cafe
Chinatown Restaurant

Java Jive and Expresso Love (named after a Dire Straits song) allude to coffee in their names but Roger says nothing about the coffee they serve. He does mention the Expresso Love noticeboard "where lesbianese/vegetarian/Scorpio/re-birthers advertise for flatmates and judging by the look of the clientele, probably find them." He also mentions the juke box at Ponsonby Pies, the second-best in Auckland, apparently. He says of Fed Up, a café still fondly remembered:

Up to Ponsonby and you'll find the famous Fed Up near the corner of Sumner Street and Ponsonby Road in a former Hutchinsons grocery shop. This place has had its ups and downs over the years as ownership has changed, but at the time of writing it was back in its original hands and was going through an "up" period. The food ranges from huge toasted sandwiches to excellent steaks and the rightly famous moussaka. Servings are huge and prices reasonable. The clientele is best described as "Ponsonby." Fed Up serves Auckland's best gazpacho.

Fed Up was gone before I arrived ten years after this book was published, as were most of those named by Roger. Ponsonby Pies was still around, but went the way of all flesh a few years back, while Expresso Love trades under a different name. The Late Night café (which Roger does not mention) hung on for a long time, but has been replaced by yet another clothes shop. Only the Mexican Cafe is still with us, but is now the haunt of office-party ghastlies. Cheap and cheerful food is a thing of the past. It went the way of Alternative Auckland (current location, The Wine Cellar) Bohemians and everything else which was local, individual and fun.