Caffiend — Restaurant in North Island

As always the food was on point but the service was very lacking on this visit. I took some out of town visitors to Caffiend for lunch on Sunday, a busy day. The counter staff/waitress may want to consider when dealing with older people or those who often need more time to read menus and such to be a bit more patient and perhaps more helpful. We ordered the meals and my guests were unable to decide on drinks. I said we'd come back to order them and was told "can you make this all in one order darling" with a bit of a huff n puff and eye roll. The person taking order may have been frustrated and under stress but that is no way to assist a customer who spent over $150. This attitude marred what otherwise was a pleasant visit. One of my guests works in the food industry and was appalled at this comment. Luckily the quality of the meal made up for this lack of customer service skills (not the first time I've observed this person react this way but the first time I've been on the receiving end of it). Meals were amazing as always; very tasty, the generous portions and beautifully cooked steaks, drinks "so-so" sadly, so it may have been an off-day, lack of staff or other reason why this person was so rude. I will come back but will avoid...

The food was very good. We had to wait a while to get served and the servers seem confused they walked around the café with our coffee and our meals a couple of times before they figured out what table we were out even though we had our number clearly displayed. But they were busy so that explains that and we were so happy with the food we ordered eggs Benedict and eggs Florentine and we loved our meals. . But then one of the wait staff was it the manager? Came up and demanded to know if we were done and shoved the bill in our face even though we hadn’t been there that long and we hadn’t even finished our coffee yet. We told him we were going to stay until we could finish our coffee I mean after all we have spent $49 on breakfast. Soon the same staff person came back with a sign that said reserved and threw it down on our table with an a real attitude. What a shame it was such a nice meal and was such a nice experience until the waitstaff came and treated us so rudely. We spent less time eating then we spent waiting for our meal but they wanted our table and treated us badly...

Delicious meals, great service and reasonable prices. Crazy busy almost all the time, best to grab a seat first then go up to order. Coffee is really good too. We've been ordering here for years. Normally we order an egg bene & black bene minus the bread and hashbrowns. The staff have always been fantastic about subbing in a couple of small sausages. But not now. A woman on the counter point blank refuses and charges us $4.50 for the sausages. Which seems pretty rubbish. Given this ends up a $60 meal for two, incl one takeaway coffee, it's not like we're underpaying. Pretty disappointed. Looks like we'll be cutting Caffiend off.

Edit: We really appreciated the staff member and manager who popped over to have a word with us. It was nice to not be made to feel like we were trying to "pull one...