Newbie — Restaurant in Waitematā

Where to Begin?

There seems to be a plethora of cafes trying to be innovative. Being "fusion" in flavour, adding edible flowers to make things look pretty to fancy uniformed staff. Every now and again a hospitality joint opens up and gets it right.........This is not one of them.

We ordered a tea -got the wrong one.

The staff member came out to ask us a question re the glazed yam salad and forgot and had to go away to find out what it was.

The French toast. sounded delicious on the menu but the coating on the fried bread had a salty umami flavour that did not go well with the creme anglaise in any way shape or form. The flavours did not pair with one another more so they were competing for dominance which made it completely inedible.

The glazed yam salad. Sweet peanut butter with some weird form of savoury yorkshire pudding type thing that was bitter. The yams were overcooked and mushy and the orange glaze was so bitter that I am completely unsure why radicchio was added to the salad for extra bitterness? The dish was composed of a few green leafs, a dressing that had little flavour and didn't complement the overwhelming bitterness -even with the sweet peanut butter it just didn't work for us.

The space is new and vibrant and the chefs definitely have good techniques when it comes to plating food to be instagrammable but sadly the overall taste experience was so disappointing it made us sad we spent $58.00

I hope this is just teething since they are new. If I could've I would've put zero stars. Sorry Newbie, you are...

The cafe is located on the ground floor of the new Mercury building in Newmarket. The cafe itself is very small but they do have tables in the atrium of the building. It was fairly busy but we managed to get a table and got ourselves some menus. After heading up to order, the waitress did come to see if we were ready to order. The iced chocolate was ok as it was very milky and not very chocolatey. Both the corny fried chick and the lamb pappardelle were delicious. I also quite liked the French Kissed Toast even though it was a bit gluggy. They also had really interesting food in the cabinet like the popcorn salted caramel donut but it was sold out after we had lunch so didn't get to try it. Overall it has really nice food. The service was ok and it would have been good if there was a sign where people could wait. The only other problem was that the portions were...

Started working in Newmarket a few weeks ago, and on Fridays I come in early so that I can have a little breakfast. Ventured to Newbie as they're one of a few places open at 6:30am, and stopped in to have a Coconut Flat White & Poached Eggs on toast the first morning, and then went again the next week and had another Coconut Flat White and this time, the Ricotta Pancakes. Wow the pancakes are next level delicious. All of the flavours are ridiculous together. It's a really nice mix of sweet and sour. The poached eggs were poached perfectly, nice and runny with no signs of white runny egg either, which is really important to me. I've had nothing but delicious food and coffee from Newbie, and I'll be returning to try their cabinet...