A Life Less Ordinary - Here's Lookin' at You, Kat

Local legend Katrina Kallil finds herself starring in a crime thriller with Detective Michael Bortnick | Photography by Daniel Rose


My editor wanted a story and was hounding me like a bill collector. But my subject, Katrina Kallil, was as hard to get hold of as a bar of soap on a shower floor.

I’d been chasing this skirt for months but she always played for a sap, leaving me with eg on my kisser. Then I got lucky. Of all the hairdressers in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.

Her new do was the cat’s meow, but what I really noticed was her voice, which was so husky it could have pulled a dogsled. It felt like I was being seduced by a Maserati. This dame had purrsonality. Whatever she had to say, I wanted to hear it.

“I have no story. In Lebanon, I would be absolutely normal. The Lebanese are like a good wine, they travel well. But you don’t want me, I have no pathos.”

It was all Greek to me.

I ain’t know Socrates,  but i knew she had a saga, so I plied her with drink.

Kallil was the kind of doll who ordered water but knocked it back like champagne. Before long she was leaking information like a prison cheese eater. She suspected the bartender slipped her a Mickey. Trouble was, I was pouring that night and that’s not my style.

She spilled that her grandfather came to Dunedin 100 years ago and decided to live close to the thriving Lebanese community. The cosmopolitan inner city, with strong Chinese and Irish as well as Lebanese elements, was regarded with horror by many Dunedin people, and sometimes known as “the devil’s half-acre”.

As a child of the ’60s, Katrina trained in the performing arts. Her mother believed this schooling would be the best way to keep her daughter away from boys.

Mom bet on the wrong horse.

Katrina became pregnant and had to “go up north” to adopt the child out.

On returning, she spent the next 20 years refining her skills in the hospitality industry. There was also a band where Katrina played the chanteuse.

But this canary needed a bigger cage, so she shifted to Q’town and opened Habebes, a kebab joint. It was a house of Lebanese/veggie delights, a description she says “sounds like a brothel”.

All was silk.

Later, when her cousin bought a boutique luxury yacht, The Ranui, they catered 40 passengers and went up north to witness New Zealand’s victory in the 32nd America’s Cup.

The following year she was aboard the same boat, carrying doctors and nurses around the islands of Vanuatu treating patients in outlying villages. She caught malaria and typhus. Evidently, this time, someone did put something in the water.

After the death of her mother, Kallil purchased 10 acres on Jackett Island off Motueka. She calls it her romantic hideaway; the stuff that dreams are made of.

I waited for the invite, but no dice.

Looking across to Nelson for another business, Katrina partnered up with Nicki Cantrick to buy the Suter Cafe in the Queen’s Gardens. It’s Nelson’s longest surviving café, and a great place to sit and watch the world go by.

Once a year, Katrina croons torch songs at the café, accompanied by her sightless piano player, Mark Wilson.

Even though Wilson is blind, he can’t help but be mesmerised along with the rest of us.

Here’s looking at you, kid.