Soul Cafe is a cafe at 69A Hautapu Street, the main street of Taihape in the Rangitikei, with a 4.0 Google rating from nearly 500 reviews.
Cafes in a highway town live a double life: they pour the locals' daily flat whites and catch the traffic off State Highway 1 between Taupō and Wellington, so the good ones are quick, consistent and unfussy. The tell of a solid country cafe is a busy cabinet of filled rolls, pies and slices stocked that morning, and locals in at smoko. Order the flat white as your benchmark; rural New Zealand takes its coffee seriously now. For the pick of the cabinet, come mid-morning rather than at the lunch rush, when the good things are already going.
On Taihape's main street, with reviews running into the hundreds, this is one country cafe the district and the passing traffic have already found.