A wonderful meal – I knew the restaurant many years ago, the service then was superb and it hasn’t changed. Staff a legend in Napier. Long may it last. The food was as it always was, tasty- well presented and good value. Tina mason

A wonderful meal – I knew the restaurant many years ago, the service then was superb and it hasn’t changed. Staff a legend in Napier. Long may it last. The food was as it always was, tasty- well presented and good value

Unpretentious to the point of nasty. The food was honest enough but incredibly boring.

I’d been told that this was Napier’s answer to Wellington’s “Green Parrot”.

It ain’t.

The menu, like the Parrot, is honest. Everything is grilled or fried and is served with chips and salad.

At the start of our meal we were given (as one does at the Parrot) a plate of sliced bread with butter. The butter was lovely. The bread was a touch … old…

I started with a shrimp cocktail that was reasonably generous with the shrimp, skimpily bedded on shredded lettuce and then completely doused and overpowered with some sort of lurid pink sauce.

It wasn’t encouraging.

For the main I ordered pork chops that were … passable.

The hint of ‘salad’ consisted of shredded lettuce with two minuscule slices of canned beetroot, a slice of tasteless tomato, all drenched in a nasty condensed-milk dressing.

The chips were … passable.

The service was the best part – it was so incredibly bland that I expected the waiting staff to break in to some sort of Fawlty Towers routine at any stage. That never eventuated ….

The National Cafe is a Napier institution but if it is survive it must up its game plan!

If you want to step back in time to when eating out was fun, unpretentious, and made you feel special go to the National Cafe.Keep this instituion alive and thriving.Wonderful.

Absolutely delicious home made old fashioned meals in an old fashioned style place…
would return