Thirsty Acres
What makes your venue the Best Gastropub in New Zealand?
Thirsty Acres is the ultimate blend of modern hospitality, in a beautiful rural setting. Big city style and warm country hospitality make for an unforgettable experience for locals and travellers alike. When the original tavern on the site burned down in 2019 Kirwee found itself without its beating social heart for the first time since 1882. Reopening in 2023, Thirsty Acres is now a thriving local watering hole serving a high standard of restaurant quality fare - a living embodiment of the term Gastropub.
While still a young venue, the Thirsty Acres story is interlinked with the history of the area, across the road is a monument to the very first stock water race that helped to turn the arid Canterbury Plains into a veritable breadbasket. The parched land around us inspired the name Thirsty Acres and we are proud to harvest many of our ingredients from local suppliers who are also customers of ours.
We are located on the Great Alpine Highway #73, the main link through the Southern Alps from Christchurch to the West Coast, via the stunningly beautiful Arthurs Pass and we proudly celebrate this place in the world. We regularly find ourselves talking to guests about the things to see and do up and down this incredible stretch of scenic road and we also love to support businesses that make their home on the Great Alpine Highway.
In the spirit of the pioneers who brought water from the mountains and mighty rivers to quench these 'Thirsty Acres' we look forward to serving the hospitality needs of all future guests who grace us with their presence in this spectacular part of New Zealand.
Describe the experience your customers have at your establishment – what is your food and beverage offering and why do people come back for more?
On arrival at Thirsty Acres our guests are often wowed at the strong architectural lines of our building and many struggle to believe it is less than a year old due to the centuries old european oak cladding that has been repurposed from ancient farm buildings to ensure we fit in to our surroundings. Inside the entrance is a large stylized map depicting the Canterbury Plains between the Waimakariri and Rakaia Rivers - the "Thirsty Acres" along with local points of interest and history that visitors love to study. On entry into the venue proper you are likely to hear "Welcome to Thirsty Acres!" loudly exclaimed by one (or often more than one!) of our friendly team. We firmly believe that guests should be welcomed into our venue as they would be into our home, and that the quality of our first interaction with them will set the scene for an enjoyable visit.
We have a large venue with a comprehensive beverage offering (cafe & bar). A large selection of tap beers from the most recognisable international brands to hyper-local craft brews that we pick up in the pub van, an extensive wine offering by the glass and a growing range of fine wines by the bottle and the largest back bar spirit selection in the Selwyn district (complete with cocktail list to boot) underline our strong pub credentials. We compliment this with a range of alcohol-free beers, wine, spirits and mocktails for those craving a quality hospitality experience without the alcohol. We also offer a full range of cafe beverages, with locally roasted barista coffee and a large variety of teas, juices, and cold drinks. This is no push-button cafe afterthought - we are serious about being the best in every category!
Our food is also more than your standard pub fare. Open daily from 9am we have a full breakfast offering showcasing locally produced Lamond Farms free-range eggs, Darfield Village Meats bacon and sausages, and produce from Johnny Fresh our local greengrocer. This theme continues through our daytime and evening menus which feature many of the classics - think calamari, burgers, fish and chips, and bangers and mash all with a Thirsty Acres twist! Our talented kitchen team also indulge their creative side with some of our more fancy offerings. Our seasonal menu has included Chicken Cassoulet, Monkfish en Papillote, and a range of export-quality steak options from local suppliers to the Pure South Handpicked Beef program, just to name a few.
In conversation with our guests, and evidenced by our many raving reviews, our service and the quality of our food continue to keep our guests coming back 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 supplier philosophy is to spend our money with people who are likely to spend their money with us, which means selecting local suppliers wherever we can. This isn't about buying local so we can tell everyone we are amazing, this is good business with good people who make up our local community. Our eggs, vegetables bacon and sausages are all exclusively supplied locally and where we can't buy from a local business we look for a local story. For example, we buy 55 day aged steak from the Alliance Meat Co-operative Pure South Handpicked program. While they are one of the biggest meat suppliers in NZ, there are no fewer than 5 Handpicked Beef program farms in our area and the local farmers can dine with us knowing that we are supporting the company that they are shareholders of.
We participate in our district's local food showcase Taste Selwyn which is a month-long showcase of local food suppliers, although we like to think that for us it is how we operate right throughout the year.
We tweak our menu with the seasons, but also run specials, with by far our most popular being the West Coast Whitebait followed by our Christmas Ham offer through the silly season. We have also hosted several themed events, such as a winemakers dinner with the Giesen Winemaker showcasing the attached menu.
We do our best to say yes to any customers who have dietary requirements offering vegetarian, vegan, and gluten-friendly options. We regularly engage our customers in conversation about their requirements and wherever possible we will accommodate them. People are quick to praise this approach as it sounds like it is uncommon. To us it is just great hospitality!
What are your key points of difference and how have you managed to deliver them?
Our points of difference are many and are often as much about what we don't do as they are about what we do. When we set out to rebuild the Kirwee Tavern (destroyed by fire on Christmas Eve 2019) we made a list of things we didn't want to be. We don't have gaming machines, we don't have a pool table and we don't have a TAB. While these are all perfectly understandable features of a tavern, they bring an element of an older style of hospitality that wasn't in line with where we wanted to take Thirsty Acres.
These decisions have allowed us to focus intently on the things that we do want to be and we consistently get wonderful feedback from customers on how well we are doing.
We are family friendly, with a kids menu, play area and families are encouraged to let their kids explore the venue. With a large open space we get great feedback about how relaxing it is for families to visit with their kids. Into the early evening its not uncommon to see young kids dancing with their parents as the music starts up before making way for the adults as the night gets on!
Our food is the best for a country mile, with our talented team of chefs producing consistently excellent examples of the dishes we serve.
Our service is warm, familiar and friendly, real country hospitality as we welcome you into our home. This is not stuffy fine dining service, but the kind of genuine engagement that makes you feel like you are in your local pub, whether you live just around the corner or are visiting for the first time in your life.
Best Known for:
Big city style in warm country setting
Centuries-old European oak building
Please describe your commitment to sustainability.
To Thirsty Acres sustainability is just good business. We operate a zero-food waste business model with strong kitchen systems to minimize wastage and all food scraps and waste is supplied to a local farmer for pig feed. Having the opportunity to install all new equipment we focused on low-energy refrigeration and lighting equipment to manage our impact. Sewerage and wastewater is treated on site as we have no access to council discharge systems further reducing our impact. We focus our beverage offerings heavily around tap beer, our view being that the keg is the ultimate returnable container. And wherever we can we source our suppliers locally to minimise food miles and enhance the economic wellbeing of our local community. We believe that hospitality businesses are the most sustainable way for people to consume food when compared to home consumption and we would love to be part of telling this story more!
Have you won any awards in the recent past? Tell us about them.
We were awarded Silver in the emerging business category at the Selwyn awards in 2023. The Selwyn awards are hosted by the Selwyn District Council and cover the entire Selwyn district which is the fastest growing in New Zealand so we were proud to achieve this accolade in the first few months we were trading. We have not had the opportunity to enter other awards yet but as we come up to our first birthday we expect there will be plenty of opportunities ahead of us!
Please describe how you create ambience.
We trade from 9 am to late six days a week so we cover a lot of different occasions. Underpinning our ability to do this well is our large open venue with floor-to-ceiling windows and a cathedral ceiling with beautiful exposed macrocarpa trusses. This creates an eye-pleasing space and we can change the layout of the room to suit our needs. Sometimes this is seating 150 car enthusiasts when one of the many large car clubs in the area comes to visit, and other times it is clearing out a dance floor for one of our famous event nights!
One big change we made to enhance the ambiance was to invest in high quality acoustic panels from AutexNZ to create a room that sounds amazing. One of the downsides of a high ceiling and lots of glass and concrete is the noise and poor acoustics, but our commitment to creating the best venue in the district meant that it was an easy decision to make to get the acoustics right. And it worked - the room sounds amazing now and we comfortably host large events and music in our space.
We focus on high-quality events, we regularly pay for DJs and Musicians to entertain our guests, and we host weekly quizzes and themed events. In short, we do it all. If you haven't experienced a Thirsty Acres party, you need to make a visit part of your plans!
