[As published in May/June BayBuzz magazine.]

Alex Tylee on twenty years of food, colour and the art of creating a beautiful world. 

There’s a thread running through Alex Tylee’s life … through the farm kitchen of her Hawke’s Bay childhood, the birth of Pipi in Sydney, through a little coffee shop in Greytown, then a bright pink building on Joll Road. 

And soon a Wellington street corner she hasn’t quite reached yet. That thread is the belief that food and its delivery to a diner, is not really about food at all. It is about creating a world. 

“I wanted to create an environment based on how I see the world and how I want the world to be,” she says. “Creating moments for people. A place to gather.” 

Alex grew up a farmer’s daughter at Flemington in Hawke’s Bay. Farm life, leisure and work was smudged into one existence. Something Alex says has contributed to her working style and her work ethic. 

She learned to cook in the farm kitchen, feeding shepherds and shearers, working from Mrs Beeton’s Cookbook and discovering an important truth early: follow a recipe carefully…and things work out. “I found that I could make croissants,” she says. “I followed the recipe and it worked.” She concedes that a natural instinct for baking probably helped. 

After university, where she studied classics and philosophy, and loved writing, she travelled. London. Europe. India on the way. She absorbed the Italian understanding of simple, rustic cooking: good ingredients, handled honestly, eaten together. She came home with something that affirmed and built on her childhood home experiences. 

The first Pipi appeared in Sydney, tucked behind an art school in a bookshop space. Nathan Hawkes, now a well-known artist, worked for Alex there, and came when she relocated to Greytown. Even then it was more than just a coffee shop. Pipi (named for Pippi Longstocking) had values and a character all of her own. 

After losing a son twenty six years ago, Pipi became the repository for Alex’s love and also a necessary distraction. It quickly became popular with regulars for its casual warmth. Alex says that she noticed early on that families would gather at Pipi for significant events, including after funerals, which showed to Alex Pipi’s importance to the community. 

In 2005, Pipi moved to Havelock North. Alex and husband Chris Morris, whose skills she describes as perfectly complementary to her own, moved to Hawke’s Bay and opened a new Pipi on Joll Road. Chris had crossed the road from Greytown’s The White Swan, which he managed, to Pipi restaurant at the birth of son Harry. 

They took on the old fish and chip shop, signing the lease without going through much due diligence. There were challenges: parking, logistics, an imperfect building. They moved in, painted the place a shocking pink (the locals were horrified) and lived upstairs for three years. 

“Beauty is really important to me,” she says. “Pipi had to be a space where nothing jars.” The pink walls, the carefully considered collection of objects that might have looked, at first glance, like a random accumulation of whatever … none of it was accidental. “The colour itself”, she insists, wasn’t a calculated choice. “It just happened”. There was no business plan, no colour-chart consultation. Pipi was an expression of a moment in her life, and every subsequent decision was benchmarked against that originating instinct: Does it feel like that moment did? 

Pipi grew. A bar was opened across the road. A food truck followed after the bar started pulling customers and Pipi began turning people away and taking the phone off the hook just to prevent more orders. Chris and Alex had swapped roles by this stage: Chris taking on the heat of the kitchen and Alex the front of house. 

Alex acknowledges she’s shy and a feeling that she doesn’t quite fit readily into ‘normal’ situations. Consequently she relishes interactions that don’t require too much phatic discourse. She says talking to strangers (and regulars), and suppliers is a pleasure. As Pipi grew up, Chris, on top of restaurant duties, helmed The Pipi Truck, which serviced the restaurant overflow as well as touring Hawke’s Bay three nights a week. 

Ask Alex what percentage of the experience was actually about the food, and she is candid. “Perhaps fifteen percent,” she suggests, “less than twenty.” She explains that people want to be taken out of themselves. The surroundings, the music, the lighting, the staff … collectively, these make up more of the pie.

Ingredients had to be the best possible, while the food still needed to be affordable for diners. It had to be honest. But Pipi was never just a restaurant. It was an ethos. A way of being. Poesy was added to the offering, a range of thin oval breads sold at nearly a hundred outlets nationally, each packet printed with a poem, because if Alex can bring extra beauty she will.

Two cookbooks emerged from those years. The Pipi Cookbook and Pipi at Home were both written at the farmhouse in Poukawa where Alex and Chris eventually settled, after moving from the flat above the café to a bigger house after the birth of their son Louis. A children’s cookbook followed, Egg and Spoon, illustrated by Giselle Clarkson.

There’s sadness, probably mourning, for Pipi now that she’s gone from Alex and Chris’s family to another. Pipi is not the same. While Alex is quick to acknowledge the inevitability of this it still causes some pain to see the loss of some of Pipi’s little character traits. The font on the menu changed, a decision Chris is animated about but Alex notices the alterations. They might seem small to some, but there are no small alterations in Pipi’s make-up. They are all significant. 

It’s clear that smarts, even after a few years. ‘Pipi has put on her gumboots and left’ she says. The sorrow isn’t just in Chris and Alex’s house. Staff and customers were deeply invested in the ethos. Alex regards them as vital parts of the collective. She reiterates that it’s not her and Chris, “There’s been Pipi and then there’s been us. She is the one who’s done all of this.”

Now, Alex continues to paint. Working from her Poukawa home. Strong colours dominate. Bright colours bring happiness. Pink, red, orange, (the right tones of course). “They’re not my colours,” she adds. “They are nature’s.” 

She wore all black at Otago University, but never since. Colour, she says, makes her feel amazing.

Wellington beckons. Harry is there. Chris is there. He’s swapped a pink truck for a red fire engine and says that he’s loving it. Louis has one more year of school in the Bay. Alex is not someone who sits quietly for long. She misses talking to strangers. She misses the creativity of business. 

“I love business,” she says simply. There are guerrilla pop-ups in her thinking. On the street … gritty city rather than neighbourhood restaurant. A food truck, possibly. Maybe a collaboration with Wairarāpa growers. A possible return to university for creative writing or philosophy. Another cookbook is in an early planning stage.

“There are one or two businesses left in me,” she says. Pipi fans and followers will be pleased to hear that. 

Don’t miss Alexandra’s latest exhibition at MUSE Art Gallery in Havelock North, now through 6 June.