Waikino Hotel — Restaurant in Waikato

I've honestly had mostly good experiences at the Tavern, but I've never tried to book a reservation before.

For my dad's birthday I started trying to call 2 ish weeks in advance so we'd get the booking. I called almost every day, different times of the day for 2 weeks, no answer at all. In the second week I left two voice message, 2 days consecutively. I drove there the following day after leaving the messages , this was 4 days before we wanted the booking, it's a 30km drive to get there from where I live.

When I got there I forgot it was beach hop, so I just walk straight back out again and left, I didn't have time to wait for the line to get through, obviously that's not there fault though, but by that point I'd heard nothing back so I just decided to stop trying to contact them and booked at the duck and Cover in Te Aroha, they answered the phone straight away, amazing service and we are booked in.

It is now the day before I wanted the booking and I still have heard nothing from them. I also double checked on there website to make sure I was ringing the right phone number. It was all correct.

It is rather disappointing as the Tavern is the nicest place to dine in and eat within a 30km radius from us, but the lack of communication and customer service is pretty sad. I hope that improves, and maybe answer my phone calls because I do enjoy going there but I will definitely choose the duck and Cover over them now for the rest of our bookings as sometimes I don't have weeks in advance to make a booking and muck around not being...

Doing a tour of north island and stopped here for dinner. Choose our items off the menu and the bar man said it was fine if we swapped the veg out for the salad on my daughters meal and I asked for veg and bacon with my Mac n cheese. All good till the waitress slammed it down in front of us. We politely mentioned that we’d swapped a couple of things out… her response was “ we don’t do that here” and flounced off. The meal was vile. A dry old baguette with a gross hotdog in it and chips instead of salad . My mac n cheese looked like it had the packs of dried veg you get in noodle cups added to it and the bacon pieces were chopped so minuscule you could barely see them. The Mac n cheese was runny and tasteless, think they forgot the cheese and seasoning. We left still hungry and didn’t wish to kick up a stink. I messaged the hotel as soon as we left and the manager said he would call us the next day. Two days later I still hadn’t heard so reminded him of the promised phone call. He called the next day but unfortunately we were on a tour and couldn’t answer but he left no message and didn’t try to call back again. I feel if he really cared he would have attempted a second call. It was the worst meal we had in the whole 17 days we spent inNZ and the hospitality left a lot to be desired. Very...

Hopefully a bit of constructive criticism, but we didn't have a great evening here recently. Upon arrival we were told there would be a bit of a wait as there was a show on, which we were fine with. While the hotel is very nicely renovated recently, the restaurant side is so noisy when full it's very difficult to have conversation with people at your own table. The wait staff wear what they like and could do with a lot more training and etiquette when it comes to dealing with the diners. Orders were forgotten and not appropriately dealt with. We realised the chef was pretty busy that evening, but there should have been more provision in place to handle this. The food was not good for the prices. Overcooked meat and fish sandwiches on soggy bread, burnt nachos with almost no beef and excess of sour cream and no jalapeños even though specified on the menu, a quickly slapped together greasy pizza with overcooked venison, overcooked mussels with melted cheese baked onto the shells that broke off and was almost ingested. The chips were good. We gratefully accepted the two free pizzas upon notifying the staff of some of the mishaps. A lot of potential, but it's just not up to scratch yet. I'm sure the Waikino Hotel will have more success in the...