Brunch @ Portstone Garden Café
Being on the east side of Christchurch, starving, and in need of brunch and a strong coffee - we eventually found a place to relax last Sunday morning.
The Portstone Garden Café looked really promising - full of people - all of the right age and dress to have good taste, fairly nice decor - with a sort of rustic garden theme that fit in nicely with the garden centre it was attached to. There was even a couch or two and some well padded booths that were unfortunately already in use. This looked like my kind of place!
The staff were friendly, seemingly competent, and were even able to deal with my being vegetarian. A large cabinet of cakes and savory pastries and pies looked appetizing and were remarkably well priced - especially at $6 for a giant piece of carrot cake. We were running a tad late, as my flatmate Ben had places to be.
I ordered the homemade hash browns with spinach, poached eggs and hollandaise sauce and a large Latte. Interestingly, this was listed seperately from the eggs benedict.
Ben had a steak and mushroom pie from the cabinet. Our meals arrived very promptly, and surprisingly a long time before our coffees. Ben’s pie was excellent, crispy, well seasoned, very well presented and by all accounts delicious.
I was a little less sold on my hashbowns al la eggs benedict. To be honest, in retrospect, there wasn’t much right with the meal - it was entirely over priced, especially compared to cabinet food, at $18. The presentation was sloppy, the hashbrowns soft, mushy, squashed, unappealing. The spinach mix was a little strange, but I can’t put my finger on exactly what was wrong with it - maybe the chunks of under cooked onion. The poached eggs were pretty good, though a tad under cooked for my liking.
My real dislike of this meal was the (certainly generous) lashings of hollandaise sauce. It was actually rather disgusting and left me feeling nauseous for a number of hours afterwards. I think the best way to describe it would be like the taste of warmed ETA salad cream, coloured to have the appearance of hollandaise. This is not hollandaise sauce. Just because it is an emulsified fat with a little acid added, doesn’t mean that it is the same food stuff. It’s like calling playdough a cake because it’s also made with flour.
In an attempt not to waste the food, I ordered some toast to go along side. Even the toast was thin, mass produced cardboard.
Finally the coffee arrived. Neither of us were very impressed - it was very watery. At least it wasn’t burnt!
All in all, the place is actually not too bad. But, I would not recommend eating off the menu - the cabinet food is superior. These guys should revamp their menu and I will visit again! We need as many decent places as we can get in Christchurch these days.
Oh, and just one final thing. Having a large and imposing pepper grinder is an awesome addition to a restaurant and adds a touch of class to any meal. However, for no extra effort and a huge customer service bonus, the wait staff should apply the pepper for you, not just hand you the grinder.
Location: Portstone Garden Café, 465 Ferry Road, Christchurch