High Tea @ Sign of the Takahe

A while back I read in the newspaper that the Sign of the Takahe restaurant had opened a cafe/bar to complement their existing restaurant. Apparently, one of the new signature dishes was the high tea. On Sunday I finally suggested that our family should pretend to be sophisticated and try the high tea. I was supposed to choose somewhere to go for lunch but afternoon tea seemed close enough.

Seeing as we had a couple of hours to kill we decided to have a game of mini golf at Pirate's Island (I WON!). It was fun even though we all got quite sunburned... well I did at least.

When we arrived at the Sign of the Takahe they had a table set up for us inside. So far so good. We ordered one high tea (for two), a platter and some wedges (Tara's idea). Surprisingly the wedges were the best thing on the table. The high tea was absolute rubbish. It consisted of three plates on one of the cool three level serving thingymabobs. The first plate was four mini quiches; two ham, two salmon. Unfortunately the chef somehow managed to use sweet shortcrust pastry for the quiche base so it tasted like an overcooked piece of shortbread. The second plate was four mini sandwich fingers; all cheese and cucumber. A wierd combination and complete lack of variety. The top layer was sweets; one scone halved with jam and cream, some little chocolate cake bites and an indistinguishable fudge/slice. My piece of scone was good but Mum managed to bite into a large pocket of baking powder... ew. The cake bites had no icing and tasted like they were made from low quality packet mix. The fudge/slice smelled like nasty Christmas cake. I was unwilling to try it but those who did try it assured me that it was as disgusting as it looked and smelled. And then to make matters worse, we were not offered the tea or coffee that is supposed to accompany high tea.

All in all it was a very disappointing experience. I copped a lot of slack for my useless suggestion. My advice is to avoid the Sign of the Takahe; even McDonalds is probably a better option.