• 4
• Vegan Cafe in lovely setting

Cafe and store run by the Cameron family (James Cameron and Suzy Amis) which supports a plant based diet. Situated in a charming vintage building in the heart of Greytown. Greytown is a popular weekend or day trip destination for near by Wellington and also features Schoc Chocolates which has a vegan range so now there are two good reasons to visit the town! The store and cafe are charming with lovely outdoor seating in the gardens where they grow the veggies they use in the cafe. Limited seating on bar stools inside. The menu is not exciting for me as long term vegan but it has not been open for long so hopefully once it is established they will widen their choices. They had a raw cheesecake on the menu but it was all gone so I had the marbled plum cake. That was disappointing because the baker had used banana as an egg replacer so basically it was banana cake with a bit of plum on top. I always think using banana as an egg replacer is not ideal and there are so many other things you can do which don't flavour the cake so strongly. Or, use a real vegan recipe that doesn't have eggs in the first place. But maybe the baker is new to vegan baking. Hopefully they will improve. The idea of a plum cake was nice though and at least it wasn't ye old bog standard vegan chocolate cake which is what you get anywhere else that offers a vegan cake. They do make and sell their own honey apparently. I just asked if the food was vegan and not about the honey because I didn't know they were into honey and assumed when they said it was vegan it was honey free. I would check that more carefully next time in case they think it is vegan to have honey. Also on the menu was a baked potato topped with soy mince and a rice risotto. To me that is the kind of everyday food I cook at home and I wasn't interested enough to order them. Again, I just think they are very new and haven't sussed yet all there is to offer in vegan cuisine. And of course there might be some diners who would love these options. But not me. The store itself is lovely and crammed with all sorts of goodies, many of which I haven't seen in NZ before. They also sell Nice Blocks so now you can go to Greytown and buy a vegan ice cream to eat as you stroll around the town. I would go back and next time hopefully there will be more on the menu that attracts. Update 2020 So I did go back and found it much improved thank goodness. Better menu, better execution, more spacious. Updated from previous review on 2015-03-20