The Broken Lantern
What makes your venue the Best Gastropub in New Zealand?
The Broken Lantern is a very unique venue that combines a street level tavern, hidden garden, function space, pool room, nightclub (on weekends), and hidden upbeat speakeasy style cocktail bar. The venue was created and operated by the award winning team behind The Parasol & Swing Company, one of Aucklands most popular cocktail bars. With a creative food menu that starts with modern twists on creative bar & bistro style snacks, our own ideal versions of classic pub fare, a variety of dairy free/gluten free/vegan/vegetarian options, and weekend BBQs in our Trader smoker.
To drink it starts with 20 different taps focusing on crafts beers, iconic pours like Guinness, some of the countries best natural wines, bespoke cocktails from a cocktail competition-winning bar team who've created an extensive bespoke menu of dozens of options, and a huge back bar of hundreds of iconic and rare spirits, and that's just the lower level. When you go upstairs to the cocktail lounge, expect top flight classics and creative creations using a host of modern techniques, that can often takes days to prepare ready for service in seconds. Over the weekend some of the countries best DJs take the stage, with regular sponsored events and the occasional live music gigs, The Broken Lantern really is a one stop shop for every type of event, catch up, date night, birthday, or just friendly and welcoming taste of what hospitality is all about.
Describe the experience your customers have at your establishment – what is your food and beverage offering and why do people come back for more?
When looking to dine, our guests could start earlier with a fabulous long lunch of lighter salads or burgers, paired with a craft beer, wine, or seasonal cocktail or sharing beverage like sangria. Happy kicks off daily at 4 for some great deals on pints and bar snacks for some after noon or after work catch ups. Then as the night sets in, we have a full restaurant menu, with a beer, wine, or extensive cocktail menu to match whatever their choice of dinner may be. If they join us on the weekend, and stay later, once the dinner hours are winding down, our DJs will take to the decks to start the night with a little background mood music, before ramping thins up after the kitchen menu is reduced to a late night menu, and then the party starts! If dancing and late frivolities are not their cup of tea, but they are still keen for some high calibre cocktails, they can either venture out to our hidden garden (Sponsored by Scapegrace) for something from our bespoke Negroni menu, or venture upstairs to the speakeasy for an number of bespoke or classic cocktail, and enjoy them in the lounge of move over to the pool room for a game on our beautiful 9 foot billiards table. We're open late every night, and until as late as 3am on the weekends.
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?
Our menus do change multiple times per year, with major changes for Summer and winter, and small tweaks every few months in between. We indicate on our menu dietary specifics, and also have the ability to tweak orders to accommodate even the more challenging requests. When we have specific suppliers of note (like farm to table), we like to mention them and our working them both on the menu, and through our social media promotions, in our attempts to continue to build great relationships, and increase both of our followings.
What are your key points of difference and how have you managed to deliver them?
As mentioned above, we not only have such a wide variety of options for our guests food, beverage, and entertainment, we deliver them with a wonderful team of well trained, and experienced professionals. Our team undergo fortnightly to monthly training sessions to cover our huge offering, and they take a great deal of pride in the products they offer. Our senior management and owners include both national, and international cocktail competition winners, so we bring to the table a wealth of world class knowledge to go with the dozens of years of experience leading the way. We also create unique seasonal experiences to make visits over time become a different experience, for example we currently have our Scapegrace Secret Garden summer pop-up running in the garden, or leading up to Christmas we have extensive festive decorations (see photo below), and coming soon we have Monkey Shoulder & Sailor Jerry 'Five Star Dive Bar' pop-ups coming to the speakeasy side for winter.
Best Known for:
20 different taps and hundreds of spirits
Cocktail lounge, nightclub, pool room, and more
Secret summer pop-up garden
Please describe your commitment to sustainability.
As you would expect, we use reliable local rubbish removers for our recycling and non recycling first and foremost. In terms of our offering, because we operate such a high calibre cocktail program, we batch all our drinks in prior to service, and utilise product to its fullest, often finding multiple uses for each items. For example when we juice our citrus, we will keep the peels to use for garnishes or use them for ingredients in cordials or oleo saccharum. We will also use our bespoke syrups, shrubs, infusions and other house made ingredients from the kitchen not only for menu items, but as potential ingredients for our bar team to create drinks based on customer preferences as per request.
Have you won any awards in the recent past? Tell us about them.
We have been nominated for Auckland best new venue and twice for best bar at the Lewisham Awards (Auckland Hospo Awards)
Please describe how you create ambience.
Our music genres will vary a little bit depending on the time of day and day of the week of course. You may start the day with some more chilled classic easy listening rock, or classic funk and soul. This will of course move into more upbeat styles as the night progresses, maintaining moderate background levels during dining periods of course, then allowing our professional DJs to ramp things up with popular music from dance, pop, hiphop and electronic genres as the night progresses. In the upper level things stay a little bit more classic with genres from 80's pop, to 70's soul & funk, then a little 90's hiphop thrown into the mix. On both levels we have a modern lighting system that adjusts at different levels in different areas as the night progresses. Our ceiling in the lower level has a full hanging lighting system that changes in time with the music when it's time for the nightlife to get going. Please see our instagram for examples of food videos content, nightlife party content, cocktail making content and more.
