Simmer Cafe

Rating: 2

We ate lunch here in August 2026.

Roast vegetable salad
Pumpkin soup
Coffee eclair

At 1 on a Saturday afternoon, Simmer Cafe was pumping. There was one available table, still with the previous diners’ dishes on it, and we had to lunge to it to mercilessly outcompete another couple. But as we have experienced on multiple occasions, popularity does not necessarily correlate with quality.

Let’s start with the positive. The pumpkin soup was fantastic. Really flavourful, seeds on top for texture, beautiful bread, ample butter, and a fair price to boot.

We love roast veggie salad, and it continues to baffle us how so many eateries get this simple dish very wrong. Simmer had ballsed up the veggie selection. Yes, there were some roast veg - carrot, pumpkin, red onion, red capsicum, maybe some kumara. But about half the veg was not roast - mushroom, broccoli, celery, some stringy green thing we’re not even sure what it was. What were these doing in here? Is this a ‘chef’s salad’ situation, where you’re just throwing whatever veggies you have lying around in to use them up? The selection came across as thoughtless. Worse still, they’d drowned it in a honey mustard dressing, then to top it off had poorly heated it so while some was warm, some was definitely not.

The coffee eclair was a disappointment. Call us crazy, but when we order a coffee flavoured pastry, we expect it to taste at least a little like coffee. This was sweet, and had a nicely textured inner cream and top icing, but coffee it certainly was not.

Bookings recommended.