Better Choice Cafe
Reviews · · · ·Rating: 1
We ate lunch here in July 2024.
Chicken and cheese crumbed sausage
Hash brown
Italian panini
Better Choice Cafe very proudly, and very clearly describes itself as a dine-in cafe. Those exact words are written in large yellow lettering right across the top of the building. They aren’t willing to let their location (in a petrol station) slow them down in the slightest. But when you’re sitting betwixt the bagged ice, gas bottle swap, and the emergency spill kit, it really feels like you’re just sitting in a petrol station.
There was just no need for them to be so unwelcoming. If you are dine in, how about a plate? How about a fork? When you throw our order altogether a paper bag, you are saying “go away”. A couple of haphazardly placed chairs and tables does not a dine-in cafe make.
The hash browns were calamitous. We’re not sure how long ago they were cooked, but it should be measured in hours, perhaps days, not in minutes. They were very thin and very dry, like they’d been pressed beneath a hash brown mountain and left for dead.
The sausage was a surprise. None of the fried goods in the warmer were labelled, but that ain’t stopping us. There was a pyramid of identical tubular crumbed… things, some of which were dripping cheese. We rolled the dice and were shocked to bite in and find a white nondescript meat with uneven cheese pockets. We have made the assumption that this was chicken, but frankly who knows. It could have been made of old serviettes.
The panini was the best of a very bad bunch. The bread itself was good, it was well toasted, and they’d cut it in half for us, although perhaps this was another subliminal hint that they wanted us to get in our car and drive away. There was ham and salami and some ‘antipasto’ which was just jarred mushroom, but at least these are a tiny bit Italian. They’d swapped out the roasted red pepper for tomato. They’re both red, we suppose, but that doesn’t make them substitutable, especially when we both happen to hate hot sliced tomato. The mayo was plentiful to the point of dripping in some areas (terrible if you’re driving!) and didn’t particularly remind us of Rome.