Town Tonic Cafe & Restaurant — Restaurant in Christchurch

I went this morning with some friends for breakfast with no expectations as I’d never heard of it before. I was SUPER impressed! They were on day 2 of a new menu, and I thought it was really interesting, a lot of cool flavour profiles and a few unusual concepts which I really appreciated as a lot of places seem to have variations of the same dishes these days.

My table had the following:

Full eggy w side of halloumi Mr simple White fish eggs bene w side of sausage Bacon eggs bene w side of halloumi French toast Banoffee crumpet

All the dishes were beautifully plated and portion sizes were good. The stand out dishes for me were the white fish eggs bene (10/10 recommend) and the French toast! White fish eggs bene was an ambitious choice I thought but I was super curious so I ordered it and I have NO regrets. it was perfectly pan seared, a little crispy and a lot of buttery flavour, the saffron hollandaise was a perfect match for the subtle flavour of the fish and it was a surprisingly light dish, I finished it with room for the French toast as well which had me equally pleased as my first bite was an experience. Really well balanced dish - the espresso cream, honeycomb, and texture of the French toast combined were chefs kiss

Things to note: we went on first table so we had a 50% discount off the food only (drinks full price) which makes it excellent for tables of 2-4 people! The coffee was also great.

Definitely recommend...

DON’T TRUST THE CHEF!! We bought a GrabOne voucher ‘trust the chef’ 4 course deal at $124. Supposed to be discounted but it’s not even worth $62 per person in our opinion. Food was definitely cheapened out version of normal dishes. Steak was over cooked despite it was supposed to be medium-rare (not that they asked how we’d like it), one of the course was a small amount of sorbet, desert was cheaply tasted chocolate mousse. Overall all the ingredients they used for these courses were as cheap as possible and it was obvious. So sad to see it’s not actually discounted GrabOne deal but restaurant is taking advantage of consumers. Much better value if you order without GrabOne on your own. I’m a small figure female and I didn’t even become full after ‘4 courses’. What a joke.

Also we had to book at 6pm even we wanted 7pm because they told us this deal us only available till 6pm on the weekends but when we left at 7:30, the restaurant was only about 20% full.

We have been here easily 10 times so far but this was by far the worst experience and this made us make the decision not to come back here...

I made reservations for this restaurant for my daughters birthday and drove 4 hours to come to this restaurant though when we got there our table wasn't ready. We were waiting around uncomfortably for 30 minutes without answers and being ignored, I myself was completely ignored even though I made the booking, they would only speak to the older gentleman that was with our party. They ended up putting some tables together in the back corner for us, by the time we were seated and were asked what drinks we would like it was an hour past my booking. Once all of the food was delivered to our table I had to go up to the counter to inquire about my daughters food who hadn't received hers. This restaurant should have a system like other restaurants where they tell the table that there is a booking at a certain time and then 15 minutes before the other booking is ready let them know that the booking is in 15 minutes. Communication with the tables would be nice so other customers aren't standing around humiliated. This review would have been a 0-1 if it wasn't for the fact that the food...