Nordie Café — Restaurant in Melbourne

UPDATE! Nordie owner Tom, reviewed the below review. Thank you Tom for following up so swiftly. I might add a few points here to consider, including the fact I’m in the hospo industry so do have a very good grasp on what goes down in cafes: In a turn of events, Nordie owner Tom seemed to feel our friend had 2 choices here: pay full price for a replacement meal that never came only to receive takeaway after everyone in the group had finished eating and we were leaving the cafe with no refund or effort to make amends OR receive the refund and go hungry. Great options there when the initial issue was serving food that was off and could have caused some serious H&S issues. Eek! No refund was ever offered…we had to ask for it, and only after we also had to ask where the replacement meal was (which turned out was never coming at all). I understand mistakes do happen, boy have I made a ton of them in hospo, but the important thing here is how the mistake is rectified. If Nordie had been overly apologetic and make every effort to make it up to us, we would have left feeling a lot better, and wouldn’t have felt the need to write this review. In this instance, we were sent on our way with no effort from the cafe to improve our experience. And following on from that, met by a world of excuses from the cafe owner trying to justify their actions, as he has done with all the other bad reviews he’s received here in this thread. My word of advice Tom…own your mistakes - we all make them - you’ll go far and earn a ton of respect from customers for doing so. Thank you for removing teenage dirtbag, you’ve done the world a great service by doing so :)

Aaaand begin review: Small cafe in red hill with a nice scandi interior. But that’s about where it ends.

We booked a week ahead for a larger group, but upon our arrival, our table was occupied by other diners. Wait staff had to ask the other diners to move so we could sit at our booked table - red flag number one!

Upon sitting at our table, to our delight we found the QR code for us to order our food, teenage dirtbag blaring in the background, we scrolled through the menu. Food and coffee prices were on the higher end of the scale - what you’d expect to pay at a boujee Melbourne cafe - so we were expecting a phenomenal feed!

Coffee by Allpress, wouldn’t be my first choice in bean for a cafe - but sometimes with the right barista, we can make it work. Unfortunately as suspected, the $6.70 I paid for the almond latte I ordered, didn’t cut it.

Ordered the Nordie stack, food came out looking the goods. But sadly, avo was too sour, egg underdone, sausage tasted like it was on the edge of going past its use by. 2/5 stars - for $24 I would have expected more.

The cherry on top though, our friend ordered a frittata $15. It came out spongey, blue in colour and tasted like chalk. We all tried the frittata to make sure she wasn’t going crazy, and this monstrosity was in fact, inedible…like I mean inedible!

We sent it back, the waitress seemed like she knew what was up with the frittata, which had probs been sitting in the fridge for the last week. We ordered a replacement egg/bacon roll.

Just when we thought things couldn’t get any worse, 20 minutes later and no egg/bacon roll came to the table. We asked the waitress who told us the roll had disappeared from the pass without a trace :O ….an excuse we just couldn’t accept.

With no refund offered for this blunder, we felt in this instance we had to ask for one, where we were met with an unhospitable “oh. Ok.”.

Waiting in line to collect our refund, miraculously an egg and bacon roll appeared on the pass, meaning…we left the cafe, takeaway egg and bacon roll in hand….zero...

Ordered two regular cappuccinos 3/4 full and a kids toastie gave name Andrew. Waiting outside like everyone else after around 12 minutes lady comes out waving a toastie calling ‘henry’. I suspected it was mine and the girl who took my order put the wrong name down. Waited another 3 minutes and decided to go inside because I knew there was not going to be an attempt from any of the staff anytime soon to actually try and work out what had happened. I walk in and say ‘order for Andrew?’ The lady behind the coffee machine (I suspect she is the owner) says ‘two 6 oz cappuccinos and a toastie Henry is all I have’ I said ‘I think you guys got my name wrong, also I actually ordered two regular 3/4 caps’... the lady behind the coffee machine begrudgingly says ‘I can make them again’ in a tone which totally indicated she didn’t really care. I said don’t worry. I then said ‘why didn’t anyone try and find me. It’s not hard for any staff member to try and find out who an order belongs to. Another waitress brought the toastie out yelled ‘Henry’ then went and dumped the sandwich next to the coffee machine and left. What she should have done was ask the girl taking the orders toastie for Henry which person was it? The lady behind the coffee machine got very defensive and said numerous attempts were made to fine me which was a complete lie then proceeded to tell me to calm down... I never raised my voice or yelled I was simply questioning what had happened. With covid and even before covid such a small waiting area means people are going to wait outside. No one wants a cold coffee or toastie. It’s not hard to train staff to ask a question who is that order for instead of dumping it and forgetting it. Even the lady making the coffee had dumped my coffees next to the Machine and made zero attempt to find me. I know people make errors especially with names, I never got upset or angry I just questioned especially after no genuine polite effort was made to say sorry we made an error let’s fix it straight away. To top it off the coffee was average we tipped it out. We definitely won’t be back. Zero politeness at this business. They think they are beyond questioning when THEY make an error....

Edit update to reply. The seated customers are separate from the waiting order area for customers who have been to this shop and for those who haven’t been. There is a good 3-4 metres distance between the two spots. If I was loud, rude, yelling or abusive why didn’t any of them tell me to stop or not yell at staff... or why didn’t any of the males in the kitchen cone out and try to ‘calm’ me down....that’s because I didn’t get upset or yell or hurl abuse or even raise my voice. I have worked in retail and been on the end of verbal abuse and to fabricate that is what I did in this instance is a poor cover up for a mistake on behalf of the girl taking the order (we all make mistakes I get that) and then the complete non effort of the lady making the coffee’s to rectify the situation by saying oh let me make them for you again with a smile on her face or let me refund you or next time you come...

Real score 4.2.

Nordie is a great find in an area that’s starting to take off. There’s much to admire here. We have a lovely modern cafe, more spacious than it appears from the street, and best of all the food is very very good.

I did research recently on cafes and restaurants in the Mornington Peninsula area. Nordie jumped out as soon as I saw that they offer smorrebrod, the interesting Scandinavian open sandwich. We had a couple of absolute beauties of these in Copenhagen a few years ago, one in particular that we still talk about. We were keen to see how the ones at Nordie compared. The happy answer is they compare well. My partner and I both had the salmon smorrebrod. This is a super dish. Fresh as a daisy, near perfectly balanced and so nicely composed. The flavour is excellent. We thought it was great and well priced too. I would return here any day anytime for this cracking dish. It’s delicious, healthy and full of flavour.

We tried a few other things from the menu as well. I’m a sucker for a good soup particularly when the weather cools. Try as I might, I couldn’t look past the soup of the day here, pumpkin soup. I love a good one of these. The pumpkin soup here is again outstanding. Beautiful, lusciously presented and a generous serve for the price. It’s also anything but bland as well. This soup has a deep flavour and a gentle but alluring touch of heat, most likely from chilli. It also has beautiful consistency. Add lovely seeded toast, two large slices no less, and you’ve got a seriously good dish. I thought it was wonderful. My partner had a potato rosti as well. It too had a little bit of chilli making it extra tasty. She really enjoyed it too.

Our coffees to finish were good but they were perhaps not up to the high standard of the rest of the experience. This struck as as one area that might benefit from a little improvement.

The cafe isn’t perfect - the order from the counter thing, for example, struck as curious for a cafe of this standard. But, the quality of the food is obviously the main thing. The food is terrific here. Fresh, beautifully presented and with great flavours. And that’s why Nordie is so well worth...