FAQs: Bowling Club Basics

No, we're not a bowling club. We're a community eatery. We encourage people to bring their own bowls or containers to reduce waste & keep costs low.

Puns aside, The Bowling Club reimagines structures & encourages people to dream up ways of creating more creative & collaborative communities. We hope our name encourages open-mindedness & creativity too.

Not at all. We have takeaway containers available for purchase for an extra dollar per meal, or 50 cents per dessert / drink containers.

If you'd like to dine in, you can borrow (and wash) dishware & cutlery from us.

We sure do, and we also accept cash.

We charge $5 for vegetarian mains, $6 for meat-y mains, $3 for desserts, and $3 for our fresh fruit juice.

You can pay whatever you'd like though... That's the point of The Bowling Club :)

Of course you can! We share about 50 free hot meals each night we're open. You can simply tell your server you'd like to eat for free. Or, take one of our brightly coloured "FREE FOOD" vouchers from our utensils table. Show it to your server when you order your kai so they know not to charge you.

We feed about 900 people each night we're open. Our biggest night ever was 1,400 meals.

We share about 1,000 - 1,400 free meals each week.

Not at all! We need your support to keep our businesses & community services going.

No matter who you are, please come over for kai. The point of The Bowling Club is to bring all sorts of people together.

If you’d like, you can “pay a meal forward” to cover the cost of a free meal for someone who needs it. Our business relies on people with AND without monetary means to come over and enjoy kai. 

Thank you for being a part of our community. Ngā mihi nui!

FAQs: Bowling Club Kai

We always have a gluten-free option, a vegan option and vegetarian food. If you have any other dietaries, feel free to reach out and we might be able to make something work.

We do use glutenous ingredients in our kitchen for both savoury cooking and baking. Because of this, we cannot promise 0 gluten. We do our very best to avoid cross contamination, and our kitchen team takes this very seriously. The highest risk time of contamination is during serving.

Each day, we offer a gluten-free main and dessert.

Our menus change daily, and are based off seasonal availability of produce and what foods we can afford to use in meals. This means our food is largely made with wholesome unprocessed ingredients.

We source our vegetables & produce from local farmers through MG Dunedin. We buy pantry staples such as lentils and potatoes from local farmers in Canterbury. We buy specialty ingredients from Davis Trading Company and other generic ingredients from Trents (Foodstuffs).We purchase our meat mainly from a local butcher Deep Creek Deli

FAQs: Bowling Club Team

Nope! All of our day-to-day operations are run by paid staff. All of our permanent staff are paid living wage. We prefer to have paid employees to keep our services at a high and reliable standard.

We also feel it's important for people to get paid for their mahi because cooking & serving kai to a thousand people a day is tough stuff!

24 people in total. There are about 4-5 people who make food in the mornings and 8 people who run service at night. We have 10 permanent employees.

We are not currently hiring. Follow us on social media (Facebook or Instagram) for updates. We spent the year of 2024 growing and developing our team. They are awesome!

FAQs: Bowling Club Community & Vision

 Most of all, come in and eat with us! Continued support from our community is what we rely on to keep the wheels turning (and our bowls rolling)! We need both the rich and the poor to make The Bowling Club work.

Also, our free frozen meal program always needs drivers to help deliver the frozen meals. Come in on a Monday during service, see if there are locations near you on our deliveries board. If so, give the 'order heart' to our team & we'll give you package of food to deliver and any other instructions.

If you can't come in on Monday 3:30 to 8pm for deliveries, email us at outreach@thebowlingclub.co.nz, and we'll see if another time works for all of us!

Donations to our free meal programs or to the bowling club generally are always appreciated. Thank you for supporting us!

We hope to bring many different types of people together around food so they may simply be together.

We also hope to address peoples needs in a practical way by making sure no one in our community goes hungry through low cost or free meals.

Not really. We don't want to open another branch, but we do want to improve and expand our services at our current location.

If you're interested in setting up a 'bowling club' (an accessible eatery) in your community, feel free to reach out.

FAQs: Bowling Club Business Model

No, we are a business. We're a social enterprise, focused on providing accessible kai to our community.

We are looking into setting up a charity arm to our business that can manage our free meal programs & community engagement.

Our business model is based on low cost, high volume. We can sell meals for cheap as long as lots of people come to buy them. Thank you for coming over for kai!

We receive donations from many generous individuals who believe in what we do. Many of these are small recurring donations (like $5/week). Some of these are one-off larger donations. Anything is helpful. Thank you.

There are about 20 businesses who sponsor us with recurring donations of about $50/month. There are also dozens of businesses who have sponsored us with materials, supplies, and one-off donations. Thank you. 

The Bowling Club couldn’t have grown into what it is now without the generous community support we receive. We feel humbled by everyone’s generosity. We also feel driven to ensure The Bowling Club remains an entity that listens to people’s ideas and needs and keeps people at the heart of our business.