Newmarket Tenpin Bowling — Attraction in Waitematā

This is the most horrible bowling alley I’ve ever been too!!!

I walked up to the counter and asked the lady about getting a bowling alley. She ignored me!! Another woman came up who had white skin and immediately she answered and gave the other woman an alley.

I am a woman of colour.

After serveral attempts at trying to gain her attention, she finally looked up at me, appearing quite annoyed and said “bowling is closed”.

Even though I’d just watched her give other people a lane!!

Frustrated I went to leave but my friends told me they had just paid the $8.60 parking fee and didn’t want to waste it.

So we resiliently went to play a game of pool. Not realising you had to pay to get the balls, sticks etc.

So we go up and ask the staff for a pool table. Once again she says we can’t because they only do hour long sessions and there wasn’t enough time before they were closing up.

That would have been fine with us, only it was just past 10pm and their sign said they close at 11:30pm on sundays.

That meant we had around half an hour longer than the hour session she said there was no time for!!!

The staff were lazy, arrogant minded and extremely racist.

My friends and I, who are all of colour felt very attacked and could not understand why they were singling us out.

We were very complacent and did absolutely nothing wrong. We were just trying to enjoy a night out together.

So we decided on playing some of the arcade games. We sat down to play our first car game together and had only just started on our second when they shut the lights off.

The place was pitch black and we could only see by the light coming from the screens.

The staff never said a word to us. And it was only around 10:30pm at this time.

Assuming there was still an hour left before closing time we continued our game in the dark.

Once we’d finished we moved on to play the basketball one. At around 10:35pm, the woman approached us to say we had to leave as they were closing up.

We asked why they were closing early and the woman told us this was the time they always shut on Sunday’s. so we pointed out the sign on the front wall that says they close at 11:30 on sundays and she had nothing to say back.

I said to her we will leave just as soon as our game is finished, which would have been 1.... maybe 2 minutes max (the basketball game doesn’t take very long, being a member of staff she should have known that) she said something in a foreign Asian language and walked to another room. Within the next few seconds she had shut off the power mains and cut our game short.

Very upset at this point, I said to her “why are you being so rude to us when we have done nothing to you? We paid for the game and you cut it off. Are you going to give us our money back?” She just walked away laughing with the other male staff member who was there.

I have never been so disgusted in my life.

I sincerely hope this place gets shut down, as by reading others reviews, it sounds like a very shabby establishment.

Would not recommend at all.

Definitely not...

I’m not one prone often to hyperbole, but this is perhaps the worst place I’ve ever been to. Not just the worst bowling alley you understand, the worst place. Full stop. The only consolation is that it’s so abjectly, existentially, almost cosmically bad that it’s actually kind of funny.

Why? Everything, and I mean everything, is broken. The lanes slope to the left. There’s a really small selection of balls, to the point that they pulled off the statistically impressive feat of not having a single ball to suit any one of our six person party. They don’t have any bowling shoes. No. Bowling. Shoes. The electronic scoring system - which was right out of an 80s movie, and not one of those ironically cool 80s movies either, more like out of a particularly bad made-for-TV 80s movie - miscalculated the scoring. And not even in a favourable way; it undercounted the number of fallen pins. And the two lanes we were assigned had constant problems; breaking down I’d estimate every five minutes.

But the pièce de resistance was the staff. Wow, the staff. I’d genuinely recommend any reader to just go to this place to witness these staff. I could spend ten minutes trying to think of suitable adjectives to describe them and I wouldn’t do them justice. I’ll have to make do with “fantastically ignorant”, “sensationally inept”, and “outstandingly rude”.

In summary, I’d actually recommend people to go to this place. Now obviously you shouldn’t spend any money. But just go to witness the sheer magic, and leave appreciating that every other place you visit on earth is...

This place is so run down it's truly an awful experience so you're probably wondering why I gave it 5 stars?

This place is an absolute relic, and I love it for exactly that reason. It's run-down in the best possible way, the faded carpets that haven’t been replaced in decades, the faint smell of mildew mixed with piss?, the elevator that has you fearing for your life and lanes that seem to work about 50% of the time. But honestly? That’s what makes it great.

The whole place is falling apart, and it has this grungy, forgotten charm that you just can’t find in those polished, soulless bowling chains. The pins are chipped, the ball return sounds like it’s dying, and you’re never quite sure if your score is going to register correctly—but who cares? It all adds to the vibe.

It’s a place that doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is: a dingy, broken-down bowling alley stuck in time. It’s grimy, it’s gritty, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. If you're into shiny, pristine places, this isn’t for you. But if you love a raw, old-school bowling experience with zero frills, this...