The Lula Inn
What makes your venue the Best Gastropub in New Zealand?
The Lula Inn is an urban escape to explore lively drinking, dining and entertainment experiences which expand from mid-morning to the wee hours of tomorrow. The Lula Inn’s success in the brunch and late-night scene provides a unique advantage over our competitors with many days expanding across 18 hours.
Drawing inspiration from New Zealand’s South Pacific provenance, The Lula Inn provides a rare urban escape right in the heart of Auckland city. Perched in the heart of Princes Wharf, it’s pacific-inspired interior brings a relaxed, colonial charm to the historic Launchman’s Building. This tropical-inspired bar and eatery suits every occasion, from a lazy lunch in the sunshine to an after-work drink or a night out with friends.
Capturing the charm of the South Pacific with its unique landscape, flavours and energy, The Lula Inn boasts a playful gastropub menu, incorporating premium New Zealand produce, fresh seafood and nostalgic family favourites with a kiwi twist.
Also unique to the gastropub scene, The Lula Inn’s vast gin collection leaves even the most dedicated aficionados feeling adventurous with an array of innovative combinations and unique ingredients.
Describe the experience your customers have at your establishment – what is your food and beverage offering and why do people come back for more?
Where the sea meets the shore, down on the edge of the ocean, our miles-away-hideaway provides a lively experience where the folks are friendly & the good times just keep-on-keeping-on.
With a menu fashioned between NZ flavours with classic pub favourites, all items are created to crave and enjoyed solo or socially, from focaccia bread made with kumara to 16-hour brisket served with Māori bread, Ota Ika (Raw fish) to beer battered Fish and chips, we’ve tried to ensure a taste of New Zealand mashed up with European classics.
Guests can enjoy the ebb & flow of craft beers, gin cheers, and specialised cocktails made with our own secret sauce ‘shrub’ a syrup made of a combination of concentrated fruits, aromatics, sugar, and vinegar for a taste punch. We have over a 100+ gins and serve up excellent wines from all regions of Aotearoa that appeals to every palate, not to forget some of the best regional and international craft beer that is on offer.
And then, as the sun sets & darkness falls; it all gets a bit louder, a lot livelier & much dancier — Live at Lula’s turns up the tempo late into the evening, with an extensive list of Kiwi artists playing every week. With a line up ranging from regular faces to one-off local and international acts, Lula’s appeals to tried-and-true locals as much as new faces who then return for more.
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 are designed to change every summer and winter, ensuring local influence provides the freshest offerings as well as competitive pricing available to us to pass on to our consumer. Ensuring we keep to our ethos of a kiwi-gastropub fusion menu design, our menus are trialled, tested and produced multiple times before being finalised, a process so thorough it is only ever a few weeks after launch the process begins again for the following seasons process begins once again.
Allergy and dietary requirements are designed by our executive chef team who have years of knowledge and understanding in this ever-evolving space, before being handed over to our on-site team for training to ensure our guests are looked after for all common and many unique allergen requests. The majority of common allergens are also printed onto our menu for ease.
What are your key points of difference and how have you managed to deliver them?
Lula’s Iconic bottomless brunch
Hailed as Tāmaki Makaurau’s original bottomless brunch, Lula’s South Pacific eatery offers our town take on Eggs Bene and Brûlée Banana Bread, and we pride ourselves on catering for all food types from the fledgling stages of this offer. The Lula Inn’s bottomless brunch always has and will always be one of the most iconic and reputable brunches in the city being the first to bring the initiative to our shores and cementing itself as the one to go to, the constant innovation of our menu means you can keep coming back for more and more. Lively, vibrant and a reason to dress up at 10am on a Saturday or Sunday, those that know ‘know’... just ask any Aucklander
Best Known for:
Bottomless brunch
Brunch and late-night scene
Huge range of gin
Please describe your commitment to sustainability.
Sustainability is no longer a ‘trend’ in any business, our day-to-day processes need to ensure wherever possible, this is at the forefront of our decisions. Our procurement teams ensure our product and produce are sourced from reputable companies and only from those on our approved supplier lists, and our commitment to smaller projects to create small impacts, such as being the first in New Zealand to remove plastic straws from our business in 2018 remains.
Have you won any awards in the recent past? Tell us about them.
2021 Runner-up Auckland’s Best Bar, Remix Magazine’s people’s choice awards 2022 Cult Icon Awards Best bottomless brunch
Please describe how you create ambience.
Ambience of a day-to-night venue should be the single most important focus of any hospitality venue, but specifically for a day-to-night venue which needs to work from light to dark and provide a range of experiences which change throughout the day. The spatial ambience plan for The Lula Inn was decided prior to day one of our built starting, with a floorplan ensuring our spaces were able to be varied, opened up, or closed off instantly as different times of day or consumers required.
The entrance to Lula’s displays mystery – visually the vast scale of the space, not to mention the view of Auckland’s harbour, is not seen from the front door. The experience created when you walk through the entranceway into Lula’s huge, yet quaint-feeling bar and eatery provides the first ambience experience for our customers; a world of choice as to the setting you feel like in that moment being able to be offered simply by where you choose to sit, be it in a darker indoor space perfect for cooler days or nights, to a deck overlooking the water which makes you feel miles from reality.
Over the years our sound and visual technology has been adapted to ensure customers are comfortable should they want to hear themselves speak, or dance like no one's watching. If a screen is required the floorplan allows a viewing experience to suit, no matter where you are located in the venue. From brunch to late, Lula’s creates an ambience second to none, certainly one not as adaptable in many, if any, other local gastropubs.
