Matilda’s

I’ve come to Matilda’s several times over the past year, it’s a place that l want to like but usually avoid and if I’m in the area I look for somewhere else to have a coffee to take out.
Food
There is quite a selection to choose from, panini’s, cakes to even breakfasts, there is a fantastic display tempting you to buy one of their freshly baked cakes. I’ve not had the chance to dine in always in a hurry and take out is sometimes best option.
Atmosphere
This place has a nice atmosphere and vibe to it, but reminds me of much of the past days where you had to Queue and that just reminded me so much of school dinners and that wasn’t a happy memory.
Service
Is not always service with a smile it may just be me but on the last two visits I’ve ended up with a grumpy goat for a server, who will serve someone else that is in the line before me even though I’m standing right at the till.
I like the food served here and want to come more often, but the grumpy staff make me avoid this place.

I can’t speak for the sit-​in experience, but I’m a regular here when it comes to takeaway. Many of my mornings begin with tea and a scone from Matilda’s, and it’s always a great way to start my day. Their scone deal (free with coffee or tea at certain times of the day) is my actual weakness. I don’t love the coffee, but to be honest, I’m American and have a different taste. Overall, great place for morning takeaway!

Pitched up on a sunny Sunday lunchtime on the hunt for tasty cake! Four adults + baby meant we had to wait a while for a table. A table of customers had finished but were more keen to remain glued to their phones for 20 minutes rather than paying and moving :(It would have been helpful if the sole server had better encouraged them on their way with the bill, but sometimes people just like to sit a while, and they’re quite entitled to!
I opted for the chocolate tart and a latte, both of which were pretty good. The others munched their way through a scone, salted caramel cheesecake («it’s lovely and light», said my mum), and the gluten-​free chocolate cake.
Overall a decent experience despite the order taking quite a while to arrive — they really need another staff member. We also had to queue to pay, after being told it would be a few minutes till we could get the bill. The cashier was also serving takeaway customers and making coffees. Polite and friendly, but over-​stretched. The takeaway 4-cakes-for-£8 seemed good value, maybe next time1

I have only been to couple of times and have always taken away so can’t review the sit in bit. First time I was in was too grab a hot chocolate, but I saw the cakes and was definitely going back to try them.
Today on my way home from being in town I thought I would treat myself so in I popped. The cakes on display look like something Mary berry and Paul Hollywood would ask their ‘Great British Bake Off’ contestants to do as a challenge. They all look so tasty and different from other bakeries. There was a bit of a queue which gave me plenty of time to choose. I picked the caramel brest which is a choux pastry ring with caramel and almonds on top, with cream, chocolate and fresh raspberries inside. It was so fresh and really tasty.
The shop is small and the serving area is long and thin which is a bit of a problem when queuing as you order at the front of the shop and then to collect you have to squeeze past the queue to pick up your drink. Staff were friendly and helpful.

If you are a lover of coffee this is the place to go. I get my coffee every day from Matildas. The staff are very helpful and its fast service which is great as sometimes i am in a hurry to get to work. The added bonus is the free cup of coffee you get when your card has been stamped 5 times. The chocolate is sensational. They do an offer whereby you can buy 4 cakes for £8.00 which my boyfriend loves and i try to discourage him to buy as the cakes are very large. and i don’t have the will power to say no. They taste too good. Love this little place :)

Mehhhhh. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either.
I confess, I was here for lunch by mistake. Somehow, months ago, when I first spotted Matilda’s, my brain malfunctioned and got it mixed up with Martha’s, and ever since I’ve been thinking that I must find an excuse to go and try ‘the west end outpost of that delicious, healthy place in town’, even though I KNOW PERFECTLY WELL THAT MATILDA’S ISN’T MARTHA’S.
So today, when my lovely mum was in Glasgow for a couple of hours, I suggested we stop by there for a quick lunch. By the time I realised my mistake, we had already had a table and menus and had ordered drinks so we were pretty much committed. Given that I was hoping for a Martha’s, Matilda’s was going to have to go some to please me today, and sadly they didn’t really deliver. The menu of sandwiches and toasted sandwiches and baguettes wasn’t particularly original and nothing really grabbed me. I ordered a baguette with Parma ham and rocket and Parmesan. It was perfectly alright, I suppose. The baguette was a bit dry perhaps, and so the sandwich as a whole was hard work because there wasn’t much other moisture from the filling. The crisps it came with were slightly soft, like the bag had been open a while. The coleslaw was more mayo than cabbage (and no carrot at all) and not particularly to my taste. The wee salad was nice enough.
The sandwich was okay. The service was a bit scatty (eg when we finished, coming over to ask if we wanted to order anything else — but not taking away our plates), and it’s perfectly alright. It just didn’t blow me away. The cakes at the front looked amazing though, so I will perhaps come back and give them another go on a cake day when I am NOT expecting a super-​healthy superfood supersalad. Maybe cake & coffee is their thing.

The coffee was expensive in comparison to other coffee shops on byres road and the taste was very mediocre for the price. I’ve only been once and will not be back again.

Bought a strawberry tart from here moments ago. I gave a £10 note and only received £2.50 back. I immediately told the cashier she had given me the incorrect amount to which she replied, «well it’s too late now» and «can’t you see there’s a queue?» My friend who saw that I did indeed give a £10 note tried to intervene, but the cashier merely complained that several people that day had told her she’d given an incorrect amount of change back to them, but she knows herself to be impervious of making any miscalculations. I used to come here quite often because I live down the road and their pastries are quite good. But I’m never coming here again. And neither are my friends who were with me. I was very disappointed with the rudeness and dismissive the attitude of their staff.

I have been coming to Matilda’s for a while now. I do appreciate their pastries but was so completely disappointed by the rudeness of their service that I will definitely not be returning. I had come in to purchase desserts during the morning of the West End Festival. I had given the cashier a £20, and waited for my change. Instead I was rudely hurried out by the cashier who did not so much acknowledge the fact that she had made an error with her till. Instead, when I made her aware of her error I was confronted by quite a few instances of «I can’t be wrong, you are definitely making this up. I can’t do anything to help you now.» The tone was extremely condescending, and entirely unpleasant. I have never been made to feel so uncomfortable. Despite their pastries being quite good, the atrocious behaviour of the woman at the cash has completely turned me off of visiting again.
Byers road is full of lovely places to get delicious desserts, there is absolutely no need to have to put up with belligerent behaviour by the staff in any of these establishments.

I haven’t been to Matilda’s for a while and it’s changed a little. They still have lots of fancy cakes and pastries but they have more food on their menu than before. As well as sandwiches they do all day breakfast/​brunch, main courses like fish and chips and burgers and daily specials.
They also have more tables now and a selection of snacks and chocolates to take home.
I’m still not sure about the place in general. It seems to be a fancy patiserrie meets greasy spoon café which is a weird combination but not necessarily bad. The one thing I hate is the very loud radio playing horrible chart music, this would be enough to put me off sitting in again but the food seems to be really good. I had the vegetarian breakfast which came with portobello mushrooms and vegetarian haggis and it was lovely. The salads sounded good and the cakes looked like they’d be worth trying again.
Four stars for the food but please change the music. I never thought I’d be eating lunch with my mum to the soundtrack of Nelly’s Hot In Herre!

I lived in Glasgow West end for 25 years and now live elsewhere. I am a baker and the daughter of a baker. I came into the shop to buy cakes for my family. I thought the cakes looked amazing. Two things, the cakes are disappointing and please train your staff how to place the cakes properly in a box and how to tie said box. A lovely girl served me but I ended up showing her how to do these things. Turns out my sister did the same thing when she came into buy cakes. As I, m sure you know it is important to get them to their destination in one piece. I, m sorry if this comes off as incredibly negative but your shop counter is a visual feast you just need to up the anti. Two stars for the visual feast and one for your staff

Great little café in Glasgow. Excellent sandwiches and patisserie goodies. A bit on the wee side so it can get busy but great value and really good quality food.

** freebie alert, freebie alert ** Sometimes you can’t help but feel let down by a ‘freebie’. They can sound too good to miss but when you receive them they’re pretty feeble and you realise it was a ploy by the establishment to get you through the door and spending your hard earned pennies. This is certainly not the case at Matilda’s who offer a free scone with any medium hot drink between 9−11am and 3−4pm. These are not just measly little things though, these are giant, super delicious scones — and you even get a choice of fruit, plain or blueberry. To top things off they’re served warm with butter or clotted cream and jam! £2.05 for an Americano and the scone is completely free! Now that’s what I call a freebie!
The other cakes look decidedly yummy too — and they’re all quite quirky (passion fruit cheesecake with a ‘test tube’ shot of syrup, a deconstructed caramel shortcake). They also offer sandwiches and a selection of hot food.
The staff are incredibly friendly and welcoming — the guy on the till today even let me off the 50p charge for paying by card when under a fiver.
Ill definitely return to try something from the menu — and perhaps sample the pretty chocolates on display. And I’ll most certainly be becoming a regular for those free scones!

This used to be a lovely little café with great choice of very nice and tasty cakes, good coffee and staff. As they have been expanding, their menu grew and now they offer a lot more choices for breakfast. They also have a fairly big market menu.
However the service has gone worse, the staff are a lot ruder now and it seems they are more interested in serving bigger groups with bigger bills than providing good service for everyone. In front of us the staff turned down a woman with a pram looking to just sit down for a coffee and was refused as she wasn’t going to order food… I thought this was quite bad coming from a coffee place, not a restaurant after all.
Although the food and the cakes are still lovely, the service has gotten so bad I don’t feel as welcome as before.

I think the coffee is the best in the west end — full of flavour unlike the chains down the road. Cakes are also fantastic, definatly worth a visit

I’d say the best part of Matilda’s is probably the wide selection of pastries they offer. It’s cash only, which limited me from buying as many as I would have liked to, which is probably a good thing. The pastries I’ve tried have all been good and I’ve been tempted by the macarons, though the price per macaron was a bit too much for me to try them out. The hot chocolate is underwhelmingly average which is disappointing, but I think if you stick to the pastries you should be leaving happy.

Saturday morning, wandering down Byres Road in search of substance, Kirsty and I paused at Matilda’s because CAKE. Could we really have CAKE for breakfast?
Turns out we didn’t need to as they offer breakfast rolls all day so we could have a proper breakfast and then stay for CAKE. I should point out that Kirsty and I like CAKE. We like CAKE a lot.
Matilda’s is more patisserie than bakery though and some of the creations on offer had my mouth watering before we even sat down. As I perused the selection a woman was ordering a few of this, some of that, and part of me did consider doing the same when we left, a take home selection of delectable delicacies, why not?! Sense prevailed, alas, with my waistline reminding me that eating all the CAKES was maybe not the wisest decision. Oh well, guess I’ll just need to go back again!
We ordered our breakfast rolls, tea and a cappuccino and sat down. The drinks arrived promptly and our breakfast rolls soon after. Kirsty opted for bacon which looked almost crispy (bar one section of fat) and it was only when the roll and sausage was put down in front of me that I realised they meant link sausage, not square.
Both were served in fresh white bap which was lovely, but I do wish places serving link sausage would cut them open prior to serving. As it was, because I wasn’t supplied with a knife, I had two sausages and a LOT of roll. Still, they were tasty enough but nothing special.
I must mention my cappuccino. The coffee was ok, I wasn’t expecting much more than that, but almost spoiled by the use of chocolate syrup and chocolate flakes on top, meaning I ended up with something more akin to a mocha than a cappuccino. A light dusting of cocoa powder really is all that’s needed.
We paused after that and considered the wondrous sweet creations and eventually I plumped for a French Brest — a circle of choux pastry topped with a thick piping of caramel and flaked toasted almonds, filled with chocolate cream, cream and a fresh strawberries. Kirsty opted for the passionfruit tart, topped with passionfruit meringue — a wonderful swirl of pink meringue atop a bright passionfruit curd in a well cooked tart base.
The French Brest was good, although the choux pastry was a little overdone so almost crispy make it a challenge to dissect into bite sized chunks, and the passionfruit curd was a little too overpowering for the size of the tart but we made our best efforts and polished it all off pretty well!
With such a selection of sweets, cakes and pastries on offer I’d go back, and their savoury menu will definitely make it somewhere I’ll look to for a quick lunch, or takeaway.
However I’m not sure it’d be top of my list, not yet.

I want them to be good. I really do and I do frequent here because of how cute it is. The first thing we tried were the macarons because we are macaron addicts. These were not good and I recommend staying away from them. My husband loves their billionaire pastry. The eclaires are sad and the croissants are rather weird. The chocolate and almond have a pudding like filling. The filling tastes weird and unlike chocolate or almond. I usually only go here if Morrison’s or Peckham’s is sold out of croissants. I’ve also had takeaway soya lattes which were unexciting too. I was really excited about this place but have to say even though I go back it never gets better.

I saw that Matilda’s had finally opened after what seemed a long time. I had heard that it was going to be a patisserie from STV News and was rather excited because I visit Paris a lot and LOVE cake.
I walked in and people were sitting down have cake and coffee, there is a good seating area downstairs but also on a mezzanine level as well.
They have salads, sandwiches, coffee, tea and soft drinks to serve alongside numerous cheesecakes, frangipane tarts, tart tatins, eclairs, Crème brûlées, macarons and more. All very reasonably priced. The tarts and cakes come in around £2.50 and the macarons are 50p each (with a discount if you buy more). I couldn’t resist buying a pistachio macaron & it was VERY good. Thumbs up from the macaron connoisseur here. I also bought a pear tart tatin, an apple tart, a passion fruit mousse cake and a chocolate and pistachio éclair. All cakes were lovely.
Definitely coming back, this time will sit in for lunch and grab more cakes to takeaway :)
Will probably turn into my new favourite coffee and cake destination. I wish there were more cakes though. Like LOTS of cake. In my mouth preferably.