Manuka, Steenberg

This is the kind of underwhelming plate put in front of me at Manuka this weekend. I don't enjoy blogging about a place that has been a big disappointment, but I guess you need to know. A couple of years I ago I had dinner there with a friend and the food was superb and the service excellent. In the meantime the place has been taken over by the same person who had Tony's at Longbeach. My friends and I would avoid that place because the service was almost non-existent and the food bland and uninteresting. Well guess what...ditto at Manuka. One can generally get a quick profile of management by the attitude of staff, and the waiters here are surly, disinterested and bored, so we could only presume they were unhappy with their lot. Why should we have to chase a waiter around the restaurant in order to request a knife that will cut the bacon? My friends both ordered egg with mushrooms, which was reported to be tasty, but my eggs had been swimming in oil and the meal was lukewarm and bland, with half a dozen chips and, once again, my pet peeve - cheap and nasty pre-sliced bread. I paid R48 for a ho hum breakfast that I could get at Spur for half the price,  plus a cheerful smile thrown in. Oh well, the Americano wasn't too bad.