Bracu Restaurant And Pavillion @ Bombay, Auckland

On our second day in Auckland, we had a very sumptuous dinner at Bracu Restaurant @ Simunovich Olive Estate . It was a dinner to celebrate the birthdays of Alycia and my MIL.   Just 40 minutes from central Auckland, with breathtaking views across the vast olive grove and the rolling pastures of the Bombay Hills, Bracu is Auckland's finest country restaurant.

Bracu Restaurant offers elegant and contemporary fine dining in a truly exceptional setting.


















Had we gone there during the day, we would have captured the breathtaking green pastures of the olive grove at Bracu.

That evening, we were seated at the patio, as shown in the picture below, the picture of which is taken from the Bracu website...



The road up to Bracu is a tad windy. Too bad it was pitch dark and we could not see how awesome the sceneries there were.  Street lights were far and between and the drive down to the expressway was one of the darkest and creepiest for us!   Hubs, his mum, BIL and sisters were in separate cars.  SIL no. 3 was driving in the car that the girls and I were in while SIL no. 4 was navigating the way by relying on Google Maps on her mobile phone. Half way down the hilly road, we lost data connection and got lost.  It was very cold and very misty that night with no street light on most stretches of the road. All we could see in front of us was total darkness with patches of mist floating.  We felt like we were in one of the scenes of Nightmare On Elm Street and Bewitched! lol!

This is the road leading to Bracu, picture taken from the Bracu website...




Our sumptuous morsel that evening at Bracu....




The cheesy quality of the pictures taken with our mobile phones (in dim lighting at the restaurant) does not do justice to the actual dishes that we had.














Every dish was tastefully and aesthetically decorated with fresh flowers and ingredients.  You can sense that both the heart and mind are involved in their inception and execution.




One of the freshest and juiciest fresh oysters that we had ever tasted...




One of the kids' meals...




After a meal of intense flavors, we had dessert of house-made ice-cream to cleanse the palate.

Everyone had an enjoyable dinner at Bracu. We were pleasantly surprised when we were given Olive shampoo and Olive body shampoo as door gift at the end of our meal.  This brand of skin care products is pretty expensive in Malaysia.  The only setback was the long waiting time before our meals finally rolled in. And of course the creepy ride home when we got lost in the  still of the cold and dark night at the olive grove.