Hydro Cafe

33 Jellicoe Drive

First of all, major kudos to the staff at this Ham East café. As soon as we were through the door, there was a “hello,” and the two girls remained totally attentive the entire time. Granted, there weren’t many other diners to pay attention to, but we all love smiling wait staff, don’t we?

The coffee was also excellent, in fact I ordered a second long black ($3.50), because near-perfect espresso, like sunshine and the opportunity to sleep in, is never to be wasted. Hydro uses Wellington-based Supreme coffee, which I’d never tried before but plan to seek out in the future after this initial experiene.

Unfortunately, two (really important) things let this place down. The décor is bleak and a little cold, like you’re sitting in a hastily renovated garage with very little colour. A couch or two would go a long way here, especially since the place is so big. It’s in a lovely spot and there’s so much room to work with. Why don’t they make the most of it?

And the food: overpriced and almost cold. Nick orders the Hydro Vege Stack, a compilation of wholegrain toast, poached eggs, hashbrowns (in this case it’s those boxed hashbrowns you buy frozen, though Nick secretly thinks those are the best ones so we won’t mark them down for this), pesto and chutney ($19). It’s expensive for a vegetarian breakfast, and his food is the same temperature as the table it’s sitting on. There isn’t very much of it either.

I go for the Eggs Florentine ($20), which is really just eggs bene with salmon: ciabatta toast, baby spinach, house-smoked salmon, two poached eggs and hollondaise. Again, the eggs are not hot, possibly from sitting on cold salmon for too long before being served…something which has also cooled down the toast. The portion is medium-sized for a $20 price tag, and for some reason the salmon is sugary-sweet.

We came here two years ago and loved Hydro for its big portions and high-quality food. Something has gone amiss. In a (fragmented) sentence: Great service, delicious espresso, boring ambiance, and overpriced food (the toilets were also a bit stodgy).

2 ½ stars 

Killer Coffee Company

A Wintec media arts graduate has developed her own coffee brand in Hamilton, with a bit of dramatic flair.

Micah Puklowski, who completed a Masters of Arts in screenwriting last year, dubbed it the Killer Coffee Company, slogan: “You can sleep when you’re dead.”

She and her brother Finn came up with the idea to go along with the imported sweets shop they plan to open next month in Frankton.

“We love coffee,” Micah explains, “and it goes well with chocolate.”

In keeping with the theme, she and her brother plan to sell chocolate bullets and hand grenades as part of the marketing for Killer Coffee. Micah personally designed the (slightly creepy) branding.

The beans themselves are Fair Trade, organic, and processed by an artisan coffee roaster here in Hamilton. You can find them online at unitedsweetsofnz.co.nz, or at United Sweets of New Zealand, 202 Commerce St, from May 1st.

Metropolis Caffe
211 Victoria St

Perhaps “Meh”-tropolis would be a better name for this place? I feel kind of sorry for the people who work here. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being in the hospo business, it’s this: if the service is bad, the staff hate their job. I have yet to find another reason for sullen or snobby wait staff (other than PMT, or completely vile, sadistic customers). If people like their job, and they like who they’re working with, it shows.



Enough of the management lecture. I order the potato scone with cannellini beans in tomato sauce topped with a poached egg ($15). The scone is nice, a bit like a fluffy English muffin, but the beans and tomato sauce taste canned. Maybe they are, and maybe they aren’t, but they are boring none the less. The egg is a teensy bit undercooked, with a bit of white still runny.



My mate has already had breakfast, so she opts for the tiramisu. It looks lovely, but I’m pretty sure it was made several days ago. The cakey part is dry – tiramisu is supposed to be almost soggy with coffee and liqueur, and the coffee flavour doesn’t really stand out at all. In the end, it’s bit like eating sweet, chocolate-flavoured Styrofoam with whipped cream. A shame, because if they’d just replaced it this morning (instead of trying to save money by stretching the last batch for an extra day), it might have been quite good.



The coffee is nice, and my friend’s latte comes to a very reasonable $3.50 (as does my long black). Beans are provided by Roasted Addiqtion, an Auckland-based coffee house which air-roasts its high quality product, and the barista here handles them with finesse.



To be completely straight-up, I’m not sure why this place has lasted so long. I’ve heard good things about the dinner menu, though I’ve never brokered the courage to try it, so perhaps they’ve got different people on at night? But the waitress was nervous and under-trained. She took twenty minutes to come to the table, and by the time she did I was already heading up to the counter to order. I think she was scared of me. Am I scary? Don’t answer that. She didn’t talk to us at all, and her boss man seemed grumpy…remember what I said before?



Go here for a coffee, but if you’re hungry, head two doors down to Scott’s Epicurean. The food’s better, and, if you’re neither vile nor sadistic, the wait staff will smile at you.



2 stars (because the coffee was good)

Interview with Raglan Roast's Bobo!

Bobo is eating a sandwich when I arrive, soaking wet from an autumn downpour, at his fragrant shed of a roasting house. Raglan Roast is not a pretentious place. There is an elaborate Sharpie mural on the plywood wall. Wooden op-shop chairs reupholstered with burlap coffee sacks cradle the rears of stout-sipping grizzled surfers, and a section of the roasting machine appears to be patched with duck tape.

This machine is marvellous. It looks like something out of a 19th century chemistry lab, it smokes like my wig-wearing, motorcycle-driving Bavarian grandmother, and it produces some of the best beans this country of coffee-roasters-galore can cup together.

Bobo fires it up with a cigarette lighter. The rumble his roaster makes as its barrel turns and its fan blows is of an industrial nature, at odds with the arty surroundings. All the doors are closed against the rain, and the little room quickly fills with coffee smoke - a smell which resembles burning wet hay. Most coffee roasters in New Zealand use either conduction heating (spinning hot metal plates which stir the coffee, toasting it by touch) or convection (fans blowing hot air into the beans like a popcorn popper). Bobo's does both, resulting in an even roast which is neither burnt nor dull.

"It's a lot like wine making," Bobo says, explaining how he is constantly developing flavours and aromas - trying to achieve the perfect blend of origins. Raglan Roast's beans, mostly fair-trade, come from a list of locales which ring bells of perfection in a coffee-fiend's mind: Sumatra, Ethiopia, Columbia, Uganda...It's no guess why their brews are so ballsy on the tongue.

"I want people to be able to drink one cup and know that they've had a cup of coffee."

In an old grey sweatshirt and slightly baggy jeans, Bobo is of that breezy breed for which Raglan is famous. Thirty-something, he speaks with the ease and flow of someone who spends his days making coffee and making people feel comfortable - both of which he's very good at. He started the company five years ago after spending most of his twenties in bed with an autoimmune disorder. Allowed out for a single hour each day, he would make his way down to a friend's roasting house and help out - earning free coffees when he pitched in.

As his health slowly improved, Bobo saved up his sickness benefit and splashed out on a roaster with his friend Tony. They bought it on Trademe for a scanty $1,875, and Raglan Roast was born.

Bobo prides himself on the fact that his two hole-in-the wall coffee houses (you can't call them cafes because there isn't any food), one in Raglan and one in the sneeze-and-you-miss-it hamlet of Te Uku, have become social magnets for their respective communities. Other cafes in Raglan cater to tourists, but Raglan Roast's (or simply "Bobo's," as the locals call it) location down a back alley, smashed in the wall beside a surf shop, makes it easy to miss if you don't know what you're looking for.

The company offers three roasts: Brown Lightning, a punch-in-the-face caffeine junky's dream, named for the effect the original blend had on people's metabolic processes;. Mocha Java, a nod to the traditional Yemenis brew, with less caffeine and a more mellow flavour; and Daganic, which is 100% organic and fair trade.

In a few months, Raglan Roast will be invading the capital. "We've bought a building in Wellington, which gives us a chance to experiment and try things out." But Bobo assures that it will be of a similar vein to his roasting house in Raglan - no food, just coffee, pure and anything but simple.

French Tart Cafe

548B River Road, Fairfield

We're starving. Our friend moved into a new flat, and the author got a bit more sozzled than she had planned last night- meaning she had two drinks (it doesn't take much when you're only 160cm tall). But there is one bright little light at the end of any big night out in Hamilton- it's called the French Tart Cafe, and it cooks the kind of breakfasts that make your cholesterol-o-meter go BEEEEEP! and your taste buds squeal like little girls as they wallow in cream, salt, butter, cheese...sorry, I'm just having a bit of a moment...

TLR orders Eggs Benedict with salmon ($15.50). It's served up on thick slabs of crusty bread with wilted spinach, wedges of satisfying salmon, and a refreshingly tangy hollandaise. It drives me nuts when hollandaise tastes like mayonnaise out of the jar- gelatinous and bland- but this stuff has just the right amount of lemon bite to keep it from being sickly-rich.

However, I often find that the true judge of a breakfast chef's mastering of the culinary arts lies in scrambled eggs. If someone can take a dish which every man, woman, and inebriated uni student can whip up, and make it into something a customer is willing to fork out $14.50 for (as I did this morning), then s/he can truly be lauded as an expert. I don't know who the chef is at the French Tart, but s/he is most definitely one of these. Their plates of scrambled eggs, roasted herb tomatoes, toasted and buttered Volare bread, and button mushrooms giddily drowning in cream (though you can get bacon instead) are so good that I must now admit something: I have never been able to order anything else off the menu.

Oh yes, and the coffee: some of the best in town. It's Fixation, air roasted (that's usually a good thing) in Tauranga and always handled perfectly by the baristas at the French Tart. I order two long blacks ($2.50 each), and TLR almost orders one- he doesn't even like coffee.

I've never been to France. I have no idea if this is "authentic," and the staff don't look "tarty" at all- or French for that matter. But the food is bloody good, the coffee is excellent, and their custard squares are not too be ignored if you have even the slightest bit of room left in your arteries. This place is not for the faint-hearted (in more ways than one), but their prices are great, the people are friendly, and the food speaks for itself- no matter what language you're talking.

4 stars

I'm going to be doing weekly cafe reviews here on Renaissance Girl- let me know if there's a cafe in Hamilton you'd like reviewed, and I'll do my best to get there!

Sugar Bowl Cafe

Maeroa Rd, Maeroa

I’ve always had a sweet spot for the Sugar Bowl. The staff are friendly, especially that cute barista dude, the food never fails to look like a friggin’ calendar shot when it arrives in front of you, and its location makes it one of those places you’d like to take your mom out for brunch.

But this is a cafe review, not a PR piece, so here we go:

The Lone Ranger ( TLR- my boyfriend- he looks a bit like Chuck Norris except way better) orders the Vegetarian Fry up ($20), which arrives piled high with creamy mushies, sourdough toast, fried potatoes, scrambled eggs, spinach, and pesto-topped roast tomatoes.

I have a Salmon, pesto and spinach omelette ($16.50)- but wait! TLR has ordered the wrong one! I am thus presented with a pesto, spinach and roast tomato omelette, which makes me very sad indeed. Luckily, cute barista dude sprints out with a slab of home-baked salmon, on the house. I swipe a fork-full of TLR’s mushrooms as cold redemption. They’re really, really good.

Now the coffee...I don’t like Weka beans very much. I know this is upsetting, and I should really be encouraging anyone who roasts coffee with passion in Hamilton- a relative wasteland when it comes to quality local beans (Raglan Roast being in a class of its own stellar self). I don’t know what it is- too dark, perhaps? But I’m not going to lie, I don’t know much about coffee roasting, and I’m not about to pretend that I do. I just find that Weka comes out a little acrid. Not unbearable- but a six out of ten on average.

Barista dude manages a perfectly drinkable long black ($3), however, despite this (minor) handicap. The crema is smooth, there isn’t too much water, and he hasn’t over-extracted it. Even TLR, self-professed coffee hater, has a sip and doesn’t make that squinchy, “I just sucked a rotten lemon,” face.

When asked what his favourite part of the meal was, TLR replies, with classic Kiwi eloquence: “the potatoes and the mushrooms, because they tasted good.” Fair enough. My omelette, for the record, was lovely and fresh, without the kg of cheese you often get in cafe versions of the dish. It came with a colourful salad (corn, mesclun, red onion and so on) on top, which made it pretty as a painted pony.

Parking is a cinch, the location is quiet and relatively peaceful, and there’s a feijoa tree overhanging the parking lot where, if you dare, you might swipe a few when no one’s looking (though you didn’t hear it from me).

3 1/2 Stars