Federal Diner — Restaurant in South Island

Just awful service. Extremely disorganized. My wife and I came for breakfast on a Tuesday. When you walk in there is no sign to seat yourself or to wait to be seated so many people walk around in confusion. When we were seated we sat there waiting for a server and no one came. We then went up to the counter to order because other people seemed to be doing the same. We were told that there were no scones left and also our coffees would take 15-20 minutes. That’s fine. It clearly states on the menu that when the scones are gone they are gone and it was rather busy when we arrived. But, as we were sitting there for 30 minutes with no food or drinks, we watched groups of people come in after us get their coffees and order and get scones. We also watched people order meals, the same thing we ordered, come out before ours. They ate and left and we are still sitting there. We asked about our order and the server said they would check but didn’t return. Finally our coffees came. 20 minutes later we checked in again regarding our food and our order was never put in. They gave us our drinks for free and a cappuccino to go. I will come back to Wanaka but I will never...

I stumbled across this little hide away place on one of my strolls of Wanaka.

What drew me to the menu was the 'Vegan toastie'. I was pleasantly surprised by the number of Vegan options for this place. So one morning before hitting the mountain I decided to try their vegan toastie. Their 'Vegan toastie' was on a bed of crunchy crusty bread with whole sauteed mushrooms and spinach, spicy salsa verde and an interesting savoury granola which consisted mainly of pepitas, pine nuts, sunflower seeds, buckwheat groats and hazelnuts.

I paired my toastie with a chai spiced tea which was syrup based and had it with almond milk, usually my preference is for loose leaf chai tea brewed in almond milk however this is quite nice and quite spicy so I was a lovely change from my usual.

Overall my experience that Federal Diner was a pleasant one and really set me up for a long day snowboarding on the slopes.

#veganoptions #wanaka...

Hip breakfast eatery with indoor and outdoor seating options. I only came with one other person but they could easily sit larger groups. The flat whites were excellent! My partner got the Bacon Butty which he said was amazing, and particularly enjoyed the tomato relish.

My banana bread was very dry and I had to drink a lot of water to get it down. You can see in the photo how burnt the edges are! The sugar is covering even more of the burnt edges. I didn’t eat the edges but both pieces were incredibly dry. The chocolate spread. was really good and I used as much of that as I could but it couldn’t mask the dryness. I’m usually careful about reading reviews to make sure I don’t get something the place doesn’t really do well but all the reviews seemed to rave about the banana bread, so maybe it was an off day.

Would definitely still recommend this place just maybe don’t get the...