Avid readers will remember the year’s first issue, in which we talked about how Eleven Bar couldn't be bothered with boring legal stuff like fire or food safety (yawn) and breached the Sale and Supply of Liquor Act from nineteen-ninety-whatever. Cracking stuff, right? Well, no, we know it’s pretty boring.
That article was written under a lot of pressure not to cock up Eleven’s liquor licence renewal hearing, which was (and is) active. We didn’t want to cause a mistrial, so we finally got around to sourcing our own witnesses like proper journalists, and now we’ve got something proper to share with you. In the spirit of fairness and accuracy, we reached out to the establishment for their response on all of these accusations, but they said they didn’t want to comment until after the hearing. Fair enough, but none of this stuff is information that came from anyone involved in the hearing anyway.
So this page is just my opinion about the whole situation, which is, to put it lightly, a bit of a fucking problem. I’ll start with my favourite bit of the saga, though, because it’s the least problematic: at some point a year or so ago someone made a fake Eleven Bar Instagram account and started posting things like “Come in and see our staff for a free kg of raw bacon!” and “Nothing’s as good as a hit from the needle. We’re hiring!” It went on for ages.
It only goes downhill from there. On the next pages you’ll see a collection of individual stories. On their own, each story isn’t all that bad; oh, they’re serving double-doubles? Sick, fuck the rules, good on ‘em. Oh, the owners are drinking on the job? Yeah, okay, that’s not great but hang loose I guess. Oh, they’re not able to pay their staff on time? Hmmm, okay. Oh, their security guys are creeping on staff members? Yeah, alright, I’m seeing a pattern here. This reeks of negligence. I wonder what I haven’t heard about.
But honestly, from what I have heard, it’s an impressive failure of an establishment that’s missed the mark on every single conceivable measure: payroll, oversight, security, basic regulations, everything. Everything but packing a crowd, which has never been a problem. And now they might not get their licence renewed, which would be so embarrassing, really. Like, guys, you own a bar in Dunedin! You’ll never have a better customer base, and you still managed to run it this far into the ground? What an achievement. I couldn’t have done a worse job if I tried.
Or maybe they’re successful, and our city grants them the right to keep it up. And what would that mean? Personally I reckon these problems have been here from the start, and they’re only promising to change now because they’re in court. You really think they’re gonna do better if you give them a second, third, fourth chance? Get real. The risk factor is already maxed out at a 10 and like anyone with half a brain, this scale doesn’t go to 11.