Le Cafe Telephonique
Reviews · · · ·Rating: 2
We ate lunch here in October 2024.
Onion bhaji
Cheese scone
Milly filly
Creamy mushrooms on toast with egg and hash brown
This is a crushing blow for Le Cafe Telephonique, and for Taihape too. The first time we came here (not reviewed, pre-BAATFR) we had a pulled pork burger which absolutely blew us away. It’s five years later and we’re still talking about it. Then we went in October 2021, and it was pretty good. Three years later, standards have slipped.
For one thing, we accidentally ordered something that we’ve had before, the onion bhaji. We didn’t write a lot of detail about it last time, so let’s set that straight. It sucked. A bhaji should be mostly onion, with some tasty sauce, ideally hot from the fryer. This thing was chickpea flour central. Dry as all heck, didn’t have a strong onion flavour, didn’t have enough relish, didn’t want to eat it.
While we’re shooting things down, the milly filly (which is just a custard square) was pretty bad too. The pasty was hard to cut so if you’re not careful you’ll end up with a big wadge of pastry left at the end. The custard was crumbly and lacked flavour. It had a big thick layer of passionfruit icing which drew us in like moths to the flame. And like moths in a flame, we got burnt. The icing was hard as hell and didn’t have a yummy passionfruit flavour either.
The cheese scone was better, but not good. It was a bit dry and not very cheesy, but we did appreciate the large amount of butter provided. In a twist, the mushroom on toast was very enjoyable. Great flavour, soft well toasted bread, a poached egg which was a little bit over, and a couple of fried hash browns. We’d happily eat this again, but unfortunately we couldn’t say that about anything else we had here today.