Simon and Lee — Restaurant in Waitematā

It is a bit hard to find bit it is situated in the corner area with the door just beside the power box. We missed the entrance the first time around and went to Hello Mister next door. The cafe is fairly small but does have quite a few tables. we were in the back area by the kitchen and it was comfy. We ordered a few things to share. They have really nice fried chicken. We went with the safe spicy chicken nibbles and it was delicious. The sauce was more sweet than spicy but the chicken was crispy and juicy. They even gave us gloves so we didn't get too dirty for the next round. We shared the dolsot spicy pork belly, bulgogi spaghetti and prawn dumplings (mahn Du Gok) with ttoek rice cakes. The bulgogi spaghetti was very moreish. Creamy and rich with flavours of the mushrooms and beef. The mahn du gok was also quite nice since the soup was really flavourful. The only issue was that some of the ttoek were nice and chewy while others were way too firm. The dolsot had huge chunks of pork belly with a (not very spicy) sauce. The rice was nice and crispy, giving it more flavour and texture. A really nice place to grab some food. The options are all very intriguing and you probably can't go wrong. just make sure to try some of their...

We came here for brunch and ordered the mushrooms and porridge. Both dishes were not bad but nothing notable either. The mushroom dish in particular was very ordinary (so much so it wasn't worthy of a restaurant menu). In general, our meal was not very enjoyable and regret for the harsh review, but with the number of high quality eateries in the area, restaurants do need to step up their game to get customers to come back through their doors.

Edit: Simon and Lee has responded an hour after posting the above review and advised that both the porridge and mushroom dishes have since been removed from the menu and questioned when we dined at the restaurant. In response to that, we dined at Simon and Lee back in February and the delay in posting our review was because we had a new baby since and haven't got around doing so. We understand this was probably quite a harsh review and we rarely do one as such but it is also an honest impression from the experience we had. Restaurants change their menus and improve constantly, we are happy to pay another visit at some point and hopefully get a completely different perspective of Simon...

Disclaimer This is a delayed review - we went to Simon and Lee in May 2018.

It was such a shame because I really enjoyed ordering Simon and Lee on Uber eats.

This was the first restaurant I took my girlfriend who was visiting from Japan and it turned out to be a bit of a disaster.

Our server, who took our order and then finished his shift: Didn’t take our full order Gave us extra spicy instead of safe spicy, which was what we clearly specified. Seemed to be really dismissive of our questions regarding the other dishes.

Apparently, our original server had asked for extra extra spicy (aka more than Danger Spicy). We didn’t know what we did to deserve this!

It was so painful that the other server felt bad and brought us large glasses of milk. When we got over the pain, we found out that the other food we ordered had not been put though. We were really disappointed with the whole experience.

I really wanted to recommend Simon and Lee.

In the end, the team working there felt so bad that they only charged us for the beers we ordered. They were nice.

Hopefully things have become better now and that...