Cardrona Hotel
What makes your venue the Best Gastropub in New Zealand?
Historically, the Cardrona Hotel’s identity was intertwined with Speight’s and the notion of a good old-fashioned rural Kiwi pub, with focus firmly placed on the beverages rather than the food. Thankfully a lot has changed here in recent years. While we are proud to retain some elements of a traditional country hotel serving the local community, we now do so alongside a much more sophisticated seasonal menu to offer a memorable experience to a broad range of customers.
Our menus cover breakfast, lunch, dinner and everything in between. Our all-day bar menu focuses on serving up traditional pub favorites with a twist, while in the evening our restaurant menu offers a more refined dining experience showcasing some of the top meat, produce and artisan products that the Central Otago region has to offer.
Head Chef Angela Cook and her kitchen team have received several national accolades over the past few years, cementing our spot as a top dining destination in the Queenstown Lakes region.
We have an impressive selection of craft beers on tap alongside the expected pub favorites, while our wine list features top-quality drops from some of the region’s best wineries.
Describe the experience your customers have at your establishment – what is your food and beverage offering and why do people come back for more?
The beauty of our varied offering is that there is always more to discover. Your experience can differ greatly depending on the time of day as much as the time of the year. A pub lunch on the couch around the open fire in the middle of winter is a completely different experience to dinner inside a private glasshouse on a warm summer’s evening.
Our menus reflect this seasonality as much as possible. While our most popular bar meals remain on the menu year-round, elements of each dish are updated according to seasonal availability of local produce.
The evening menu provides more scope for creativity in the kitchen and is even more reflective of the seasons, changing almost daily. While this allows our team of chefs to really highlight some of the incredible Central Otago produce we have at our doorstep, it also provides nice variety for our in-house hotel guests who may be staying a week and dining with us each night.
Whether calling in for a coffee or staying for dinner in the restaurant, our hope is that on each visit you can discover something new – whether it’s a new dish on the menu, a new favourite local drop or simply a new favourite spot in the garden to while away an afternoon.
Tell us how you showcase NZ produce / offerings? Does your menu change with the season and how is it locally influenced. How do you accommodate allergy and dietary requirements?
We’re fortunate here in Central Otago to have access to some world-class meat, produce and locally made artisan food products. Centring our menus around local, seasonal produce is paramount to us, for both sustainability and quality.
We have recently established a small kitchen garden within the hotel grounds, with work underway on a much larger potager garden in the paddock adjacent. Currently the produce from these patches supplements our other suppliers and we are confident that an ever-increasing proportion of our produce can come from these gardens.
Outside of our own garden, much of the rest our produce, along with lamb, beef, eggs, and honey comes from Royalburn Station, a 15-minute drive along the Crown Range. It is a true farm-to-table scenario, giving our kitchen the freshest possible ingredients. We are also very excited to have Royalburn’s new ‘Swifty’ beer on tap. In a collaboration with Garage Project, Swifty is made from spray-free barley grown on the Crown Terrace.
We aim to be inclusive to all our customers every menu has both gluten free and vegan options. It is nice to see out tofu-based wellness bowl consistently among our best-selling bar dishes. Wherever possible we will adapt any current dishes to accommodate allergies and dietaries requirements.
What are your key points of difference and how have you managed to deliver them?
In summertime, our beer garden is our biggest asset and one that really draws in the crowds. Not many venues in the area are fortunate enough to have such a large, established garden setting, and in the warmer months it provides a lush oasis in an otherwise dry landscape. We are continually working to improve this area and have two full time staff members taking care of our outdoor spaces. New additions to the beer garden recently include 6 glasshouses to offer sheltered, semi-private dining in the garden and a new children’s playground adjacent to the beer garden which has been real hit over the summer holidays.
In winter we’re famous for our Après Ski, and the vibe on a winter’s afternoon between 4pm-6pm is hard to beat. A glass or two of our locally made mulled wine and hearty bar snacks are the perfect end to a day on the slopes, and skiers travel from all over the region for the experience.
Best Known for:
Beer garden
Hotel facilities
Local Cardrona Ale
Please describe your commitment to sustainability.
As a family-owned business with young children, sustainability is at the forefront of every decision we make. Aside from growing what we can onsite and supporting local suppliers, we have introduced a ‘portion guide’ to our snack menu in an attempt to minimise food waste. We also compost all our own green waste, have our own local recycling arrangement and our cooking oil is recycled.
Have you won any awards in the recent past? Tell us about them.
2018 Supreme Winner. 2018 Best Country Hotel. 2019 Best Country Hotel.
Please describe how you create ambience.
Housed in a 160-year-old building steeped in history means that creating ambience is something we don’t need to worry too much about! We work hard to maintain this iconic slice of Kiwi history, ensure all the little touches are attended to – candles burning, roaring fires, beautiful gardens – but apart from that the ambience really takes care of itself. There is something very special about this building and we are simply the caretakers, doing our best to preserve this much-loved venue.
