Clarence Tauranga Restaurant — Restaurant in North Island

Review updae

We visited the bistro a couple of years ago and had a wonderful meal with some exceptional food and wine. I’ve also had the privilege of eating at The French Cafe in Auckland, so my expectations were high.

Unfortunately, the experience was a little disappointing. The food was okay, and some of the tasting menu dishes were good, but the desert was disappointing.

Disappointing was the service. At one point, we had cocktails, snacks and the first course all lined up on the table at the same time before we asked the wait staff to slow down a bit, and perhaps give us time to order some wine!

Even more surprising the reasonably experienced sommelier could offer no more advice than to have white wine with the first three courses and red wine with the second. Unfortunately we got to course four before we could get the attention of the wait-staff to get the red wine, that we chose ourselves.

Overall, not good value for money at $690 for three people.

Old review

This was a great restaurant in an old post office in the heart of Tauranga. The menu had a range of options from à la cart to tasting Menu. The service was very good, the place was busy and leather apron staff were high energy. Most of the dishes were accompanied by description from the executive chef which is really appreciated and the by the glass wine options were...

Bad...Honestly, we came here expecting better. Our table was seated next to a table of four, the table next to us was served pizza, which was litteraly black, burned like nothing we have ever seen. The table commented on how black it was and the server just walked away. You could smell the burned pizza a table over.

Our order came out and they served us cheese with no bread or crackers, litteraly just soggy cheese. The table next to us also ordered the same thing as the menu is not clear on what things are. And the person it was meant for had ordered it as a meal.

Then OUR order came out, and the pizza was also burned, and covered and I mean drenched in oil. I am a qualified chef and I can say that this has to have been the most disappointing pizza I've seen. They charged us 26 dollars for this.

Our pork was still pink in the middle when it came out, and our cocktails were overpowered with ginger.

Phone rang all night and no one put it on silent, ring ring all night long, to the point where it was causing complaints.

A server offered more oil to go on the already drenched oil pizza, what?

Same song on repeat for 20 mins, by the end of the night (we stayed 1 hr) we were just wanting to leave.

We will not be returning to this place. I have had better service and food in litteral second...

Dined here in May 2022 so things may have changed since. I had high expectations for our bday celebration but they sadly weren’t met. The meat items were cooked fantastically & worth the splurge, but overall we were let down by the lack of consistency & bad customer service. Overrated, awkward dynamic with the servers, just save your money for Somerset.

The portion size of the Paris mash was shockingly tiny. The figs dessert was charred to the point the smoke they emitted was very off-putting. We sent back the figs without eating it but we still had to raise it with the female senior manager in order to get them taken off the bill. The cocktails are ambitious but don’t quite hit the mark- the balance of the flavors & alcohol content was off.

While many mains were delicious, we just didn’t think it was an elevated dining experience worth $500. The server we had was new, which is no big deal, but we found it very strange that the senior female manager was standing behind the new server the entire time, critiquing her but not quite being helpful to us diners. Just a very strange dynamic & not what we expected from a fine dining experience. Keep the office politics behind the scenes, please

Also the corkage fee they quote was quite high-...