Burger Burger Founder Mimi Gilmour Buckley Launches Mama Italian Restaurant

From burger queen to spaghetti and a disco ball: An Auckland hospo legend is heading back to the restaurant floor and she can’t f***ing wait.

One steaming bowl of pork broth and rice. Two bibimbaps (beef and snapper). One dish of daikon kimchi. A second dish of cabbage kimchi.

“This is the problem with going out with me,” says Mimi Gilmour Buckley. “I’m always, like, I want to try EVERYTHING.”

The restaurant table as a metaphor for life?

Every story about Mimi must begin with her hospitality pedigree. Her mother Emerald founded some of Auckland’s most infamous venues – Clichy and Club Mirage and, later, Tatler and Spectator bars.

As children, Mimi and her sister Sophie stole coins from the till for the jukebox and asked the chefs to cook them “chicken fries” coated in stock powder. Years later, Mimi would open the first of her Mexico restaurants in the old Clichy space. She sold her stake in that chain in 2014 and launched Burger Burger, the brand that began with a 50-seater in Ponsonby before expanding around the country and into multiple Auckland sites.

Now: “I want to go back to my roots and create a space that embodies everything I love about hospitality. For me, those values come from my family – especially my Mama – who taught me that cooking is love, and great hospitality is about making people feel seen and lifted.”

Mimi’s empire is being variously franchised, sold and reimagined.

Among the changes: next year, Takapuna’s Burger Burger will halve in size to accommodate a Greek restaurant. Next month, the Newmarket store will become Mama, the pizza, pasta and comfort Italian food restaurant Mimi is opening with longtime friends and collaborators Mike Slaven, Joe O’Connell and Leisha Jones.

We’d be doing this interview at Mama but, early September, it’s still a construction site.

Five large skylights have just gone in. Test pot paint colours stripe one wall. An antique cabinet, salvaged from the mechanic who used to own this space, is now a front counter. A floor buffer operates at full noise and, in the kitchen, a ragu is a work in progress (at home, Mimi is trialling at least three different types of focaccia).

Decamp to Dweji, the next-door Korean where the speciality is pork soup with intestinal add-ons and the manager gently jokes about our entry-level white people selection.

“I like to consider myself a true foodie,” Mimi tells him. “But I do have a slight challenge with offal ... Maybe I just didn’t grow up on it. I have had crispy tripe, which is quite good, but I can’t eat braised tripe. Am I being boring?”

Her neighbour is curious about the Burger Burger refit. She tells him it just wasn’t doing the dine-in numbers for the floor space, that delivery apps have changed the way people dine (and hot chips don’t always travel well). But she also thinks the economy is turning, and she’s predicting a real-world hospitality renaissance born of a backlash to social media and artificial intelligence.

“People gotta eat,” he says.

“People gotta eat,” she agrees.

Restaurants, she tells Viva, have got to adapt.

“In the last five years, we’ve had Covid, obviously. Then we had this huge hike in wages. Floods. We couldn’t get a leaf of spinach to save ourselves. A shortage of CO2, which they use for weird things that you don’t think about, like sealing fresh chicken. This year, the price of beef has gone up 50-60%. And then we’ve had a massive recession, which means everyone’s spending has decreased.

But something had to give. And it was very nearly Mimi.

“I just had this day where I felt like I couldn’t breathe. And I never don’t know what to do. I’m a person who thrives in chaos.”

Mimi, 41, has recently accumulated a list of Big Life Events that would floor anyone. Her father died. A friend committed suicide. She experienced post-natal depression after the birth of her son, Augustus (now aged 2), and was diagnosed, officially, with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Her skincare line and wellness app became embroiled in an intellectual property stoush. She downsized and moved house. And she worried, constantly.

“The last year has been, like, on my knees desperately. How can I keep doing this?”

Eight years ago, Mimi and husband Stephen Buckley’s first child Olympia was born with a brain injury. She was diagnosed with quadriplegic spastic cerebral epilepsy and her parents were told she would not walk or talk.

“She’s so beautiful and so special. But it’s definitely not without its challenges. It changes you. It changes your life, it changes your marriage. We are part of the furniture at Starship [Children’s Hospital] where we have an amazing team.”

Octavia, her second child, is six. For years, she had a recurring dream of a teenage boy carrying his oldest sister in his arms. She thinks, perhaps, she manifested Augustus.

“He’s the last little perfect piece to our family. But it almost killed me.”

On that day when she couldn’t breathe, Mimi phoned a friend. He told her: “You’ve got a million ideas in that brain. Sweat those assets. Get busy. Do what you do best.”

And, at the Korean restaurant where she has ordered far too much food for two people, she says, “sometimes you have the right conversation with the right person at the right time. I was like ‘oh my God. He’s f****** right’.”

Restaurants are in her blood, but when Mimi left high school, she studied photography at Auckland University’s Elam School of Fine Arts. Her doctor father told her, “this is the last time in your life you’ll get to be free”.

Today: “I don’t think I’d ever be an artist, but I think it made me a better thinker. You have to create something that stimulates a conversation or expresses something that might be on your mind ... It’s kind of what I do in restaurants, you know?”

She is fascinated by the way humans perceive and influence each other. She remembers other art students asking if she was rich. She photographed family friends in their big houses and big ball gowns and big jewellery and then super-sized the shots.

“Like, if that’s what you want to see – here. Is this real? Does it matter? They were so big, it would almost make you feel uncomfortable and, I don’t know, stimulate conversation? Also, like f*** it – here they are. They’re awesome. They earned it. Why judge?”

What you see is what you get. A breath of hurricane force air in black Issey Miyake (top, bottom and bag), Marle and LA Tribe. Unfiltered. Quite brutally honest.

“I’ve just realised I haven’t been looking at you. That’s another thing about my ADD. If I need to concentrate, I can’t look at your face.”

Her own face, she says, has “a really overactive forehead but you can’t tell because I’ve had a lot of Botox”.

In a 2015 interview, she summed herself up in a single word: “Fearless”.

Has life tempered that descriptor?

“No,” she says, immediately. “It’s my strength and my weakness. But you have to remember, I’m not doing this blind. I’ve been doing this for a long time, I’m surrounded by good people. I’m never afraid to ask for help.”

She admits her own mother has questioned whether Auckland needs another Italian restaurant.

But, “the last time I went out for a big night, we ended up at a bar and I swear to God I felt like I was double everyone’s age. Why is there nowhere for mature humans to go and have a slight boogy and a cocktail and not be in a club surrounded by drunk teenagers?”

Mama will be that place. It will have a disco ball and dancing on the tables will not be discouraged. People need this, she says, pointing to the annual customer surveys she conducted at Burger Burger.

“It’s just kind of mind-blowing to me, the social isolation. People saying ‘I find it hard to meet friends’ ...

“Forever and a day, humans have sat around a table and shared food. Conversation is critical to building a strong community; Well-mannered, capable children who aren’t riddled with anxiety, because they know how it is to be a little bit uncomfortable ... I always quote this American chef who said ‘when you sit at a table, we are all created equal’.”

“Of course” the new restaurant’s name is symbolic.

“Mothers are the centre of the home, or communities, or of bringing people together. That’s what I want to keep doing and try to do really well – build restaurants that are accessible, fun and consistently really good.

“I came from my mother. I am a mother. What do I want my kids to see? I want them to see a mother who gets up when the times are tough and creates beautiful things and teaches them work ethics and creates a place that people come together.”

Also, she was sick of looking at spreadsheets.

“I feel like I’m going through a rebirthing of me as a restaurateur.

“I’m just fulltime back in the hospo game and I’m f****** loving it. I can’t wait. I can’t wait to zoom around that floor.”

Kim Knight is a senior journalist on the New Zealand Herald’s lifestyle desk.

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