Cook Saddle Cafe & Saloon — Restaurant in South Island

The Restaurant is pretty cute - lovely stone fire place, old time feels, but that was were my happiness stopped. It is a small rural town, so you pay tourist prices - there was very little on the menu for under $30. I opted to order and pay at the bar and ordered 3 meals which came to NZ$101 I had ordered a Soda water and lime, so asked for that to be removed and paid $92.50, which still didn’t seem right, so I looked at the prices when I returned to the table and realised he had charged me $17 for the soda water and only removed the soda, not the lime. When I asked them to clarify the cost, they realised their mistake and tried to refund me, but not one of the three staff present knew how to do do a refund, so she charged me again instead of the refund and then I ended up just getting the refund in cash. The food arrived, we had Chowder, which was OK, but for $32 I thought is was pretty small of a portion. The fish and chips were huge, but as my husband had his first bite, he said ‘it’s cold in the middle’ and then we saw it was in fact raw and frozen on the middle. So for $34, they are serving frozen fish, which seems a little on the nose, on the West Coast of NZ, beside the sea. They replaced the fish and chips, but the damage was done. As for the ambiance , there were loads of rude locals barking orders at the staff to change to music or just talking so loudly that the whole...

If I could give this place no stars I would. Firstly the staff were very rude. We asked to see a menu and the lady snapped at us saying they didn't have one and to go look at the board like she said. So basically this "menu board" had a bunch of things on it which showed no details about anything so you were left wondering what you had really ordered. We decided to get the only thing we thought was pretty obvious to be yum no matter what the rump steak, we asked the lady what it came with and she said "i don't know, probably chips and salad". I was starving at this stage so I didn't care. Our food finally arrived and the first thing I noticed was that our steaks looked completly different. We had both ordered rump steak medium rare, yet my friends steak was double the thickness of mine. My friend is a chef and I asked did we just get different steaks? I ate it anyway. It was ok, nothing special, like I said I was starving so I really just wanted to eat. After eating we left straight away because we just didn't want to be there anymore. We left feeling cold and still a little hungry. I would not reccomend this place to anyone and even though it may look like there is not much choice in fox glacier, there is at least 1 other out there that cant be any worse...

Just had the weirdest experience at this local restaurant. Trying to support local economy as we are all doing it hard. The night before our 40th wedding anniversary We arrived just before 7, had order taken. 1 hour later we were still waiting for our meal, we had to chase it and they told us it got lost in the system due to internet down. Would be another 20 mins, chased it again after 20 mins told another 10 mins. Other diners were stopping at our table sympathetic to our predicament. The manager came and sat at our table and told us how hard they are having it, covid, loss of business etc, only three staff bla bla bla but please give a good review. Our food arrived and as the Manager was walking away I said to Hubby “that’s not really an apology” as an “offer of drinks on us” goes a long way to apologise. The manager turned around picked up our plates, turned around and took them back to the kitchen leaving all the other diners gobsmacked. Then she came back and asked us to leave and wished us a merry Christmas. What the actual! We didn’t shout, make a scene just said that we shouldn’t have to chase our food and the other diners commented how calm we were given the circumstances. Still can’t quite believe this has...