ON the dock OF THE BAY
When Gina and Graham Neilson, owners of Durban’s multiple award-winning 9th Avenue Bistro, announced they were relocating the restaurant, their website received so many hits – around 90 000 – it kept crashing. “One of the biggest lessons I learnt from moving is that I hadn’t realised how much we meant to Durban,” says Gina. The move was necessary though. “We were a neighbourhood bistro but a lot of our customers and many local businesses were moving out of Berea and going north to Umhlanga and beyond.”
The couple knew that in the challenging restaurant arena, if they were to grow their business, they too would have to move from the space they’d long occupied in a shopping centre on 9th Avenue in Morningside. “The bistro was purely about dining. We realised we needed a bigger place so we could offer multiple facilities like a cocktail lounge, and a venue for conferences and weddings,” Gina
