Water Bar Wanaka — Restaurant in South Island

Kia ora,

I’m writing to make a complaint about the service my partner and I received from one of your bartenders today — a European lady with glasses. Her behaviour towards us was extremely rude and unprofessional, and it made us feel very uncomfortable.

When we approached the bar, she asked for ID. We explained that we didn’t have our physical IDs on us but had another version available. Instead of handling the situation politely, she stepped back from the bar, gave us a dirty look, and quite loudly said, “Oh no, I can’t serve you,” while raising her hands in the air. The tone and body language she used were completely unnecessary and disrespectful.

To make matters worse, I was only planning to order food — my partner was the one wanting a drink — but she didn’t even give us the chance to explain. We decided to leave because of how she treated us.

What really bothered us was that we noticed her serving another customer afterwards without asking them for ID, which made us feel singled out and judged. It honestly felt like we were being treated differently because we didn’t look like everyone else there.

I’m very unhappy with how this was handled and disappointed that such poor customer service was shown at your establishment. Please ensure your staff are reminded that kindness and respect are part of good hospitality — it’s really not that...

Nice location with view of lake and sunsets (and parked cars). Friendly sever inside at the bar. It would be more enjoyable if they took your order while seated at outside tables, but they don’t, every drink you want etc you have to get up to go inside and order. Suppose if you are on a date here you can impress your date with your own attentiveness and service? Not nice. You haul your own drinks back out. They do bring your food out. The staff is nice though. My wife liked her lamb shank, well prepared and big serving. Chicken wings were good not great. “Buffalo sauce” was not anything like real Buffalo sauce, should be called sweet spicy sesame sauce to avoid confusion. Seafood chowder at pricey $27 NZ was okay but disappointing, the cream base was good enough but it lacked a decent amount of seafood and therefore had a weak seafood taste, had hoped to get a real seafood-rich chowder given NZ has good seafood, but was just okay. This place is good but falls behind every other place we’ve eaten at so far on our 10 day NZ trip (and many of those places were less expensive too), with the self serve approach here really making it last place. I think next time we will try a different...

Wednesday night $1 wings. Two words, be careful.

I'm not sure what sort of eugenics new Zealand has used on its chickens but the selective breeding has lead to wings the size of wheel hubs on the Mazda premacy. Ignorant of this we ordered 10 of the bad boys each, choosing to have them hot. Well blow me away and throw me at the talons of a kea bird but I reckon the waitress may need a chirpiractor after delivering those wings to us. She should have had assistance because the total load must surely have been over 17 kg. I did six wings, maybe seven, before I became a mumbling mess. I had to go to the bathroom and stare at myself in the mirror to try and ground me back to reality, I was completely mind shattered by those wings. Had I done only seven? The wings were tasty but they had destroyed my ability to count. We had poutine side which looked and smelt good but my stomach curdled at the idea of more food. People around us offered sympathy and patted me on the top of the head once or twice each. It must be a local thing.

The beer was good, service great, and the noise just sufficient to get long term hearing damage. Would go again, in fact we did the...