Veggie Bites

This was pretty much the first place we saw after parking the car, and we were hungry so we decided to eat here! I had an omelette with onion, tomato and cheese, and without ham! I also had a side of hash browns – these were your normal run of the mill hash browns, which was a little disappointing after the last few times I ordered hash browns at other places! The omelette was pretty good and it all came with a couple of pieces of toast – one grainy and one white. Martin ordered scrambled eggs, muesli and we both had an orange juice. There were no complaints from him, but there was certainly nothing that made these meals stand out from any others that we had – in fact, they would probably have been some of the more average meals we ate. And lastly – the orange juice was horrible!

We went to Milford Sound to do a cruise to see all the sights. The lonely planet guide said there wasn’t much here, but I assumed there would be more than one single building that did food and information! It was a cafeteria type thing and they truly have a captive market – three hours drive from the nearest possibility of other food! All that considered, they did actually have a couple of veggie choices. You order your hot food by the plate size and a medium plate (NZ$14) gives you one main and two sides. We both chose the veg pasta – which was just penne with a basic tomato sauce, I chose roasted potatoes and coleslaw and Martin had chips and garden salad. All in all, it wasn’t too bad.

Martin had breakfast once or twice here when he was in town for a conference, so we thought we would check it out. There weren’t a whole lot of veggie options on the menu – but there were things that could be adapted. I ended up ordering the potato cakes and poached eggs with tomato instead of sausage as well as a chai latte. Martin had a bagel, muesli and a banana smoothie. The potato cakes were pretty good, not as good as the ones I had the day before, but certainly good, the poached eggs were cooked well and the whole things was pretty good. Martin said his bagel was average – not much you can do with a toasted bagel! But the muesli was fantastic – it came with lots of fresh fruit on top and heaps of different grains and nuts etc as well as yoghurt and milk. His smoothie was pretty good, but the chai latte was terrible – it is one of the worst I have ever had. I don’t know what they did to it, but the spices had a really harsh, nasty flavour – maybe they managed to burn them with the hot water. I added some sugar and some of the milk that Martin had with his muesli and then it was passable, but certainly nowhere near good! Overall, the food was good – but avoid the chai lattes!

This was a late-ish lunch after a late-ish breakfast and way before a very late dinner! We weren’t overly hungry, but we knew we had to eat something as we were doing a tour that started mid-afternoon and wouldn’t finish until late. We were both looking at the same things on the menu, so we decided to get both and share them. We ordered the soufflé omelette with tomato, onion, capsicum and cheese and the coconut pancakes with kiwi fruit, banana and caramel sauce. Both dishes were delicious. The omelette was absolutely huge, there was no way I could have eaten it all myself, so I was glad Martin was having half! The pancakes were also quite big with lots of fresh kiwi fruit and banana (although I am not a huge fan of bananas, it had been quite difficult to get them here for a while due to the cyclone in Queensland – and when you can get them, they are expensive and taste horrible, so we ate a lot of bananas in New Zealand!). There was quite an interesting range of food on the menu, which, of course, I can’t remember now, and I would certainly check it out again!

We had read about this place in the Lonely Planet guide and in the Air New Zealand magazine, so we decided it would be an excellent place to stop for lunch on the drive from Christchurch to Dunedin. They do tours of the factory, but we didn’t have time to do that. We did pick up a pamphlet when we arrived and discovered that all of their cheeses are made with non-animal rennet which made us both very happy! Unfortunately there were not a lot of vegetarian options on the menu, so I ordered a chicken panini without the chicken. The lady who took our order looked a little surprised and I explained that I was vegetarian. When it arrived and I started eating it, I decided that they probably added a few extra things to it as it was quite different to what I expected – it had a relish instead of pesto and came with mushrooms which were not listed on the chicken one. It also had tomato, spinach and brie. It was quite delicious! Martin ordered a mushroom and camembert melt and because he was really hungry also ordered the crumbed feta salad – which was large chunks of smooth, creamy feta, crumbed and fried on top of a salad. This was one of the most delicious feta cheeses that I have ever eaten. We debated as to whether we could buy some cheese and take it in the car without any means of keeping it nice and cool for the rest of the trip, but we finally decided that we shouldn’t do that. It is definitely worth the stop and I would try and leave a little more time to have a look through the factory and taste some more of the cheeses!

The breakfast that we had here was pretty good, so we decided to try it for lunch when we were in Manuka for other reasons on this particular day. I have to admit I was a little disappointed with the variety of veggie food on the ‘lunch’ menu, so I opted for a breakfast dish – eggs florentine without the ham – I always thought the point of ‘florentine’ was that there was no meat – obviously I was wrong!! Anyway, it was ok. We also both had hot chocolates – they are very good here! Martin ordered the veggie risotto and thought it was ok too. I think I would go back for breakfast, but I wouldn’t bother for lunch!

Well, I said in my last review that I would like to go back here and try the little donut-y things that this place does, since we were looking for dessert, we decided to check them out! I think they are called proffertjes and they a a bit like little fluffy pikelets, with a kind of lemony/sugary taste to them. They taste pretty good with caramel topping and ice cream, Martin thought they were good with maple syrup and ice cream. Either way, they were pretty good and they went quite well with hot chocolate too!

This place used to be called Diversity, and I can still remember the excellent pizzas that we had here, so I was keen to head back and try it again. They still do pizzas but I have to say the whole experience was a a little disappointing! We ordered a gourmet veg pizza and a pumpkin and feta salad. The food arrived and we were so busy shuffling things around on the table so it could go in the middle that the waitress didn’t tell us what she had just brought out. We assumed that there was an awful lot of eggplant on the pizza and started eating. However, I soon decided that it was all a little too meaty for it to be eggplant and we asked a waiter what sort of pizza it was. It turned out to be duck, and when we said that we had ordered a gourmet veg pizza, the waiter told us that duck was quite nice – as if trying to convince us to stick with the pizza we had. I pointed out that we were vegetarian and we really would prefer the pizza that we ordered and he took it away and consulted the kitchen. It turns out that the wrong order was put into the computer, so they had to make us a fresh gourmet veg pizza. To their credit they did this quite quickly and we were told that the duck pizza would be removed from our bill (I should think so! . I wasn’t overly impressed by the gourmet veg pizza – there certainly wasn’t much that was gourmet about it! But it was ok and it was better than duck! We ended up receiving a discount on our whole bill for the inconvenience of it all, which was a nice gesture, although given the whole experience I am not sure that I would bother again!

It had been a long time since Martin and I had gone out for breakfast, so we decided that the long weekend would be the perfect time, before we did the grocery shopping. Gotta keep your strength up for that! We wandered around looking for somewhere, and finally decided on this place. They had a few veggie choices, but hey, breakfast is pretty easy to adapt, right? I ordered the (something) omelette and a side of hash browns and a hot chocolate. Martin had the pancakes with caramelised bananas, muesli and apple juice. The food was pretty good – the pancakes with the caramelised bananas were divine (yep, I got to taste them!), and my omelette was full of chunks of potato, capsicum and onion – yum! The hot chocolate was so good that I ordered another, however, it took so long to come, that we finally cancelled it because we had finished everything else and were keen to get the grocery shopping out of the way!

This was lunch with a friend and it was great to catch up – so believe it or not, the food was secondary! Anyway, I had the roasted sweet potato and spinach salad and a citrus splice drink. I have to say that this salad was awesome. I loved it! The sweet potato was warm and there was chunks of semi roasted tomatoes (I would have preferred a few more, but then again, I love tomatoes!) and also roasted pumpkin seeds – something I don’t usually like, but they were great in this! At the time I thought that I should remember what was in it so I could make this at home, but I have forgotten, so I guess I will have to go back!