Dining
One kitchen feeds both rooms. It takes a delivery from the Tauranga fish market at six most mornings and builds the evening around whatever came up.
Moturiki
Named for the small island off Main Beach that you can walk out to at low water and regret at high. Ninety-six seats inside, forty-four on the veranda when the easterly stays away.
The kitchen runs a wood grill — manuka and a little apple — and most of the menu passes over it at some point. What is on that menu depends on the six o'clock delivery: snapper, kingfish, gurnard, tarakihi, whatever the boats landed. Scallops when the season allows and not one day outside it. The rest comes from within an hour's drive: Te Puke citrus, Katikati avocados, lamb from the Kaimai foothills, tomatoes from a grower in Ōmokoroa who has supplied us since the year we opened.
Dinner is à la carte, five or six mains at a time, written on a card that is reprinted every day. There is no tasting menu and there will not be one.
- Breakfast6:30 – 10:30am, seven days
- Dinner5:30 – 10pm · last orders 9:15pm
- Seats96 inside · 44 on the veranda
- Breakfast for house guestsNZ$34 per person
A fair idea of the evening
The card changes daily and this is not it — but these dishes have survived fourteen years of rewriting, which tells you something.
Vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free and dairy-free versions of most of the card are made to order — tell us when you book rather than when you sit down, and the kitchen will do something better than a substitution.
The Long Veranda
Fifty-four seats along the western side of the ground floor, half of them outside under the run of roof that gave the hotel its name.
The list holds 214 labels. Sixty-three are from the Bay of Plenty, Gisborne and Hawke's Bay, and twenty-two are open by the glass on any given night. There is a serious shelf of Gisborne chardonnay because somebody here is unreasonable about it, and a short, good list of local beer from Mount Maunganui and Te Puna.
Cocktails are made properly and there are eleven of them. Bar snacks come out of the same kitchen until eleven at night, midnight on Fridays and Saturdays. Nobody has ever been asked to leave for wearing jandals before six.
- Hours11am – midnight · to 1am Fri & Sat
- Seats54, half of them outside
- Wine list214 labels · 22 by the glass
- SnacksUntil 11pm, midnight weekends
Until eleven, then a short list
The full menu is available in the rooms from 6:30am to 11pm. After that there is a short overnight card — a sandwich, a soup, and something sweet — which the night porter brings up until six in the morning.
No tray charge. There never has been one and adding it now would be a strange thing to do.
The Pilot Room, after six
The sixth-floor boardroom becomes a private dining room in the evening: one table, fourteen seats, and the best view in the building. Set menu, agreed a week ahead with the kitchen.
Minimum spend applies Friday and Saturday from December to February.
Walk in, or do not risk it
Moturiki takes walk-ins and keeps a few tables back for them every night. From Boxing Day to the end of January, and on any Friday in summer, book — the veranda goes first and it goes early.
Dinner, a bed, and no drive home
The dining package puts a three-course dinner for two at Moturiki with a room and breakfast the following morning. It is the reason the restaurant is busy on Tuesdays in July.
- Moturiki6:30am – 10pm daily
- The Long Veranda11am – midnight
- Room service6:30am – 11pm, then overnight card
- The Pilot RoomPrivate dining from 6pm