JOUST IS OUST!!! That is how my review will start unfortunately. Little to be desired to be quite honest. I would rather go to Valentines for a smorgasbord meal and i don't rate Valentines as being that good either! Utterly disappointing. For a small town like Orewa, you need to impress people come on!! My husband took me to Joust for my birthday on 29 Dec 2011. We will not be going back. They didn't name their food so you didn't know what the hell you were eating from the limited selection. The green salad looked like yesterdays tossed, so it looked alot fresher. The dessert bar, OMG, little Christmas mince pies that were obviously purchased from Countdown and then cut in half to make it look like they had more. Crap restaurant, crap food, and oh, the seaviews were minimal as the main front windows of the cafe were covered in so much sea salt you couldn't see out plus it was a rainy, wet day also. Word of warning, don't go their if its pouring down with rain. They lock the main front doors on the street front with a hand written sign saying " use rear entrance" but where was the rear entrance after standing in the pouring rain to find it and when we did, the door was shut closed so we were drenched by the time they saw us to open it. We had to call through the window to someone to open the door.

My husband and i went there to celebrate our wedding Anniversary with friends Saturday 10/4/10 and wished we hadn't!!! the place was packed and you could see that the staff were not coping. Hindsight said we should have walked out then. When we had been seated we had to wait 30 minutes before being given a drinks menu to look at . We watched as wrong meals were being delivered to wrong tables (a table number indicator would have been useful for the waiting staff, methinks!) After a two hour wait we finally got some food and it was sorely disappointing: the seafood chowder was nondescript , insipid and lacking in seafood , a bread roll would have been a nice accompaniment but was missing, corn fritters were doughy and missing the main ingredient, the chicken with cranberry and brie was missing the cranberry and brie . Need i say more......

Fantastic Food, Great location and would have to be one of the best restaurants in Rodney!!! Not fantastic options for Kids (Just fries etc) but apart from that would recommend to anyone looking for a great restaurant with a great view!