A great place to stop on the back road past Taupō, popular with bikers, Waikato River Trail riders, and anyone who likes to avoid the hell of SH1, The Dam Cafe puts Whakamaru on the map by serving up a range of toasted sandwiches, including the essential baconandeggtoastie.

Mine came fresh and perfectly cooked, the toast brown and slightly, perfectly buttery, the egg soft but not running out of the toastie, only marred by the generous amount of bacon being cut up into tiny pieces. Three things wrong with that: it felt like eating a kids meal, bits kept falling out making it necessary to use all 8 fingers plus thumbs to create a seal around the toastie as it was eaten, and not least, the fun of biting into a perfectly cooked bacon rasher was lost.

All up, worth a stop, good baconandeggtoastie marred by overthinking the bacon.