Bendigo Corner Store Cafe — Restaurant in Victoria

My partner and I used to always go to the Corner Store Café for either a nice meal or a great coffee and it soon became a favourite for us.

After a bad experience with customer service, we contacted the café via facebook message and expressed their concern about how we were served. The owner/manager at the time offered us two free coffees, which was a kind gesture, but after the experience we weren’t too keen on returning.

After a couple of years, my mother had moved back to Bendigo and said she wanted to try their coffee/food after hearing great things about the place. We were served by an unfriendly gentleman who gave us great service, but did not smile and didn’t seem to be enjoying himself. Because the coffees were nice, my partner and I decided to go for lunch a couple of weeks later.

We arrived at about 2:15 pm and waited for about 10 minutes to place an order, we were concerned because we knew the kitchen closed at 3. We got told to wait because it was table service and we were served by a kind gentleman, long hair, very friendly and ordered our meals. My partner ordered a Texas style beef sandwich and a bowl of chips to share and I ordered the Chicken Salad. The salad itself was pretty tasty. The rocket, tomatoes, cheese, walnuts and balsamic dressing complimented each other very well however the chicken was cold, which seemed odd in the salad. Underneath the salad was a very oily potato rosti and under that was a tiny bit of warm chicken. This bit of chicken didn’t taste quite right, so I ate the rest of the vegetables and left the chicken and potato on the plate. After my partner finished her meal, we spent about 10 minutes chatting and I mentioned that I was feeling very full and a little unwell – but this was odd considering I only ate half of my salad (I only had one chip from the bowl also). As we left, I said to my partner that I wasn’t feeling 100% and didn’t know what was wrong. Less than 5 minutes later, driving up near St John of God Hospital, I asked my partner to pull over and I vomited from what I believe was food poisoning. Immediately after I vomited, I felt a little better, so I don’t think it was a bout of random gastro. When we got home, my partner rang the café and spoke to the manager, who claimed that herself and 6 other people had eaten the salad and were fine. She spoke quite rudely to my partner and my partner had to tell her twice that there was a bit of warm chicken in the salad, the response she got was “well the chicken is meant to be cold”.

The manager didn’t really offer any apologies and certainly didn’t offer any form of a refund, which would have made the experience better. I would still like a refund of the $23 I spent or at least the $16 - $17 I spent on the salad. I will not be going back to this café and I would not recommend this...

My mother always raved about this being her favourite cafe in Bendigo and how much she was looking forward to taking me there. We planned to go for a late lunch, seeing the opening hours listed closing time at 4pm.

When we arrived at 2:30pm we were completely ignored despite being the only ones in the cafe. After a few minutes of waiting to be acknowledged, we made eye contact with a waitress. She acted surprised we were there, despite having walked past us several times. She was unfriendly and told us the kitchen was closed.

I asked her if we were still able to get food from the cabinet since their opening hours listed them being open until 4pm, and she rudely waved a menu in front of us to prove that the menu said kitchen closed at 2:30pm.

We again asked if we could order from the pre-made selection in the counter and she sighed and told us "well I guess I can microwave it, as we have tuned off our ovens."

In normal circumstance with pleasant service, we would have been quite accepting of this but it was the rude staff who made it clear we were unwelcome and a bother arriving at 2:30pm.

We chose to dine elsewhere and despite the other cafes kitchen also having finished lunch meals, they were more then happy to serve us coffees and a selection of sandwiches and cakes from their counter.

If your staff don't want to serve customers after 2:30pm, then don't list your opening hours as being until 4:00pm. Your rude staff mean we'll...

We travelled from Castlemaine to Bendigo for breakfast, today, on the basis of these fantastic reviews as a special treat for my birthday. We arrived at about 10.20 and were told that their system was just rebooting and we wouldn't be able to order for about 20 minutes. We sat down and after about 5 minutes the waitress dumped a bottle of water that looked cloudy and two glasses on our table. 5 minutes later she arrived with menus and as she was walking away apologised for the wait. At 11 am (40 minutes after we arrived) my husband went to the counter and asked if we could at least get two coffees and we would pay cash. He was told that she would have to ask her manager... our waitress arrived back and said the system was still down and we couldn't even get coffees because they couldn't open the till.I asked her if that meant that she had really no idea of how much longer we needed to wait , saying it could be 10 minutes, 2 hours or even tomorrow morning. She said that was correct and that we could choose to leave or stay and then walked away. Actually, she was decidely rude. So, feeling rather disappointed, with that sort of attitude, we left without even having had a glass of water. We all understand that technology sometimes fails but surely going back to paper orders, telling customers they could only accept cash and a polite attitude from our waitress would have solved some problems. Very unhappy prospective customer!! ...