Mad Hatter Cafe + Bakeshop

I love Mad Hatter. It's a nice place to lunch after a day at the gardens. Their food is good, their beverages are good, desserts are great and the vibe is chill. I'm partial to the Salmon Wasabi wrap, and the Chicken Thai wrap, the black and white cake and the strawberry cake. They also have expanded their outdoor seating courtesy of COVID which is great. (update 2023) Great place to gather or even to work. There are many students and professionals working from here. Their breakfast foods aren't as great as before. Pastries and sweets are still good. Free Wi-Fi, lots of seats and outlets. Comfortable place.

I’d had cake from MH before (which was solid), so I popped in on a very busy Sunday around 1p for a sandwich. They were busy (understandable given the university and post-church crowd), but everyone was working hard and my sandwich was ready in pretty good time. The sandwich itself was HUGE and came with a side of pesto penne, so really it was 2 meals for about $14. Not bad at all!

The place with amazing espresso, and the worst possible service and the rudest you can experience. Everybody deserves few slaps in a face and to be fired and go work somewhere else out of hospitality.

It was a high energy noisy place but the food and service was decent. The potatoes were good, not greasy. It is more of a college crowd. The spinach eggs Benedict was good except for the bread, very chewy and hard to cut. I enjoyed the fresh squeezed OJ and coffee.

I’m a frequent customer and their service and food is great.

We visited Mad Hatter years ago when we first visited Durham. I had such good memories of the best vanilla cupcake I’d ever had! We went again this fall to get a cake for my daughter’s birthday and also got a cupcake and cookies (because why not?). Unfortunately, none of it was tasty. The cake was beautiful (!!) but the icing tasted more like butter than buttercream and the cake itself was very dry. The cupcake and cookies were similarly low quality. We threw every bit of it away and bought a cake at a grocery store. I cannot say enough about the beautiful atmosphere and the super friendly staff in store, but we emailed to let management know about the poor quality of our desserts and never received any response. There are better (and cheaper) desserts in Durham, so we won’t be back. Bummer.

The worst dining experience I’ve had in a long time. I get they were probably busy, but that still doesn’t excuse how the staff acted or the fact several people who ordered their food *after* me received their food long before I had (even with the same dish). I ordered a Thai chicken wrap, and 3 side dishes for my toddler (scrambled eggs, a cup of fruit, and breakfast potatoes). It took over an hour to receive my food, and might’ve taken longer had I not gone up to ask (TWICE) about the status of my order. The couple who ordered food AND coffee after I placed my order had already grabbed to go containers to box up their leftovers to leave. When I went to ask about my food, I was ignored by the staff I talked to. After seeing her go to several more tables with food for people who arrived to the cafe 30 mins after I arrived, I went back up and had to ask a barista for assistance since the 4 staff bringing food to guests just ignored me and refused to make eye contact. I finally was told I was “next,” but I feel like they just overlooked me and forgot my order as several Thai chicken wraps came and went already. How long does it take to make scrambled eggs and throw some fruit on a plate? I didn’t even have a drink order. No one apologized or gave me a reason for why it took so long. Then after I *finally* received my food, after entertaining a hungry toddler for over an hour, I needed to-go containers to bring home leftovers. With their inattentive staff they should just keep containers readily accessible for guests, since I had to endure another 10 min wait of having staff continue to walk past me and not bother to assist before I finally had to interrupt someone and ask for a container. (I was up at the front, by the kitchen too…not just sitting at a table expecting service to be brought to me). I guess I have to choose one star solely because I can’t give zero stars, and the one plus they have going for them is having a changing table in the women’s restroom for us moms with small children. I’ll also say that this was the first time I dined in, but I’ve had a few to-go orders and had similar experiences where I was just ignored by staff while I waited for assistance. There was one time I had a to-go order and was waiting for 10+ minutes after the estimated pick up time, and when I finally asked someone about the order it was sitting back in the kitchen and no one had brought it out to the set of shelves they usually bring to-go orders to. So this doesn’t seem like just a one-off experience where I caught them on a bad day. A mother-daughter group sitting near me seemed to have the same experience where I heard complaints about waiting 40 mins for a salad, only to receive something wrong with the salad. It’s a shame because I love to support businesses and give praise where praise is due, but I will not be going back to Mad Hatter any time soon.

Great place to eat. Delicious food. Only negative...as a first timer, I walked in and had no idea if you sear yourself or wait to be seated. No one acknowledged my presence so I had to just grab someone walking by in order to find out you order at the front and then seat yourself. Loved the food though. Everything I tried was delicious!