True Food & Yoga eatery and wellness centre opens at Auckland’s Okahu Bay
Perhaps this shows us that things really do change. In Tamaki Drive, Auckland’s Hammerheads was a bastion of early 90s luxe, serving seared scallops with big buttery chardonnays and a first-rate view back to the city skyline. It was a formula that saw the restaurant sail through that decade, but the new millennium saw it struggle, and it closed its doors in 2015.
Now the venue is casting off its booze-and-good-times guise to slip into something more suitable for this health-conscious age: it has reopened as True Food & Yoga, a wellness hub and yoga centre that is the brainchild of husband-and-wife restaurateurs and yoga enthusiasts Nic and Kelly Watt.
Nic, who has worked in high-profile restaurants in Australia, Japan and the UK, is the chef behind the enormously successful Japanese restaurant Masu on the ground floor of the SkyCity Grand Hotel. Kelly is also a chef, as well as being a qualified yoga teacher and reflexologist. At home, they have chickens, beehives and a vegetable garden. Whatever a lifestyle of wellness is, they look like walking advertisements for it.
True Food & Yoga is housed in a handsome pre-World War One building that first entered service as a sewage pumping station. Its makeover, spearheaded by Nic and Kelly and the team at Matrix Group, features lots of suitably restful blonde woods, soft pastel notes, hints of brass and lots of foliage (as well as retaining Hammerheads’ original copper bar).
There are two airy studios that host classes in several yoga styles, an 80-seat café, a wellness centre, a chiropractic room, a shop and an outdoor area. It’s open for lunch and dinner seven days a week, and for weekend brunches. Tamaki Drive, as many people know, is often full of walkers and cyclists. Many of them will be delighted to have a new venue where they can pause to contemplate picturesque Okahu Bay and the city beyond, and how much this old building has changed.
True Food & Yoga
19 Tamaki Drive, Okahu Bay, Auckland
truefoodandyoga.co.nz
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Photography by: Simon Wilson.
