Acheron — Restaurant in Christchurch

The four of us booked for their Christmas buffet, which was advertised on Eventfinda.

The booking process was extremely convoluted as the link took me to the restaurant’s webpage to make a regular reservation. Then someone called me a few days before Christmas to tell me I had to pay to confirm the booking. After refusing to give my card details to someone over the phone, I asked for the restaurant’s bank details, which never arrived in my email, so I went to the Sudima Airport hotel to pay directly. The lady who took my payment also got my details to make sure they marked me off as paid. On the night, after we’d eaten and left, they called again to ask if I’d paid. This marred an otherwise lovely Christmas dinner with excellent food in a nice setting. For $129 a person, one would expect a big hotel restaurant to have systems to keep a record of who has and hasn’t paid.

For the future, I would suggest, for things where you want customers to prepay, to make use of services like Eventfinda to set up a ticketing system. Yes it costs some money but it will give you a clear list of attendees, and you won’t be relying on someone calling a customer from their cellphone to get their card details. I half suspected I was getting scammed.

The servers were lovely so no fault to them. The lacklustre rating is solely reserved for their payment and record...

Beautiful restaurant. Was there for my mother’s birthday - they were VERY accommodating, especially Becka; who served us. Thank you Becka for making our day :)

For mains we had the mushroom risotto and the battered fish - all of which were exceptional.

The desserts were well presented and delicious; mango gelato and the sticky date pudding.

They also had this adorable robot that sang my mother happy birthday and gave us a beautifully presented “happy birthday” written in chocolate and...

Food is fabulouse, and the service with a smile was a lovely surprise after all went wrong at the airport today. I was in the mood to discredit anything, but couldn't. It was...