Twizel Bakery Cafe — Restaurant in South Island

This place was the pits. Definitely give it a miss. For a start the staff seemed very confused that we wanted to order drinks as well as cabinet food. There seemed to almost be a reluctance. Clearly eating in is something that doesn't happen often, with most people taking food away to eat. Perhaps don't advertise yourself as a cafe if you can't do it properly because it's clear you can't! Then after being given a very grubby food-stained number, which made me apprehensive about how safe the food was going to be, the food that required heating up arrived but the coffee I ordered never did. I eventually went in and asked about it and it turned out it had been forgotten about, which was surprising since it wasn't as if anyone else was waiting, and I could see three staff. When the coffee did come out it was plonked n front of me, no apology for the long long delay. Perhaps just stick to being a bakery and try to do that well and give the cafe side a miss and leave that to the professionals. To add, we were at one of the outside tables and very clearly on one of the cafe seats was a condom wrapper. The fact that the staff could clear tables and not see this was very telling about the care given and the general cleanliness. Average food, bad bad service,...

The first time we visited, we wanted to grab a late lunch to go and appreciated that this bakery/cafe was still open while many other places were closed on weekends in Twizel.

Their gingerbread flavoured hot chocolate and flat white were very made well. The pork riblets that came in a roll had a good amount of fat and was better than we expected. Their mince and cheese pie was hearty with beautiful pastry. The custard crounut was just yum!

We came back again just before leaving Twizel for the hot chocolate and coffee. Arriving early in the morning, we saw many locals there which was a testament to how good this place was.

🅿️ Plenty of free nearby parking available ♿ Wheelchair-friendly stairless entrance with sliding door. Plenty of space between tables...

Summary: average bakery, need improvement on cleanliness.

Food 2.5/5: considering this is a small town bakery, it has a good variety of choices, especially for sandwiches. There's not much going on for the Dagwood Sandwich that we had, just wish the bread could be softer.

Environment 2/5: The cafe is kinda open space, and there's no staff cleaning the tables nor monitoring the cleanliness after customers left, therefore you will see birds patrons every now and then....

Service 2/5: The cashier looks grumpy the whole time we were there, showing her long face (unhappiness) to customers. So, I can't say we had received...