Sailmaster Tavern — Restaurant in Adelaide

I called to book in on the 22nd October, for a November 4th lunch, the polite team member on the phone asked if it was for a special occasion, to which I responded that yes it is actually for our 11th Anniversary – “oh we will make sure you get a nice table”. I confirmed that we could order the seafood platter with gluten free options (my partner is very newly diagnosed coeliac) & the staff member confirmed that this is “no problem”.

We arrive on the day at 12:25pm for our 12:30pm booking, to be greeted by the hosting staff members and asked for our reservation. We were told that our reservation was actually given away and they are so sorry, “but go find a table anywhere, it’s not that busy” – in retrospect, I shouldn’t have shortened my name to John (a more common name) & just left it as Jonathon. But would have been great for the staff to confirm when seating the other party that the phone numbers matched, or that it was for their anniversary. Really poor start!

Then my partner heads up to the bar and orders the seafood platter, as gluten free as possible, completely understanding that having it without traces is idealistic at a place like this. The staff member at the bar taking the order says that it should be fine & that they can just substitute as best they can – grilled fish/prawns instead of crumbed/battered. We order, pay our (close to $200) tab for a round of drinks & the platter and have a chat at our table whilst waiting. A staff member then comes out to us and mentions that we can’t get the seafood platter as gluten free, we explain to her (the poor girl, not her fault) that we had called to confirm this very issue two weeks prior, and also confirmed this when ordering at the bar, to which we were told there would be no issue. She then runs back to the kitchen to see what she could do.

10-15 minutes later we received our seafood platter, with the staff member just putting it on the table and walking away without explanation. There was battered soft shell crab & salt and pepper squid still on the platter so we assumed that it contained gluten, fine for me to have, but at this point, it would have been really nice to have an explanation from a manager or similar as to what has gone wrong with this whole day. The food was decent but throughout the entirety of it (after looking forward for such a long time), we were discussing how poorly operated this place was and how disappointing our anniversary lunch ended up being.

The whole day was just a comedy of errors and any real management team would have been aware of this situation and taken steps to rectify, nothing was done in our case and it just left a sour taste in our mouths.

Avoid this place if you have any dietary requirements, want a special occasion meal, or have a common name which someone...

Venue is super nice, great atmosphere, heaps of staff. Meal looked really delicious, but unfortunately was underwhelming overall. Cooking was uneven throughout both dishes. The Chilli Plum Kangaroo was over cooked - i get the cut is hard to cook, but if you're gonna serve it you have to know how to get it right. Blanched Broccolini was pretty much raw, the mixed grilled veg underneath was deliciously perfect except for a single snow pea that was completely charcoal 🤣 The mash and jus was excellent. Don't really understand why there were fries there when there was a generous serving of mash already and tonnes of veg - it just seems wasteful - and they are soggy/underdone.

The seafood medley same kinda story, some of the calamari was good, some was obviously over done and chewy - same for the prawns, and whiting "goutons" (lets use this quote from the classic movie Princess Bride here. "You use that word... I do not think it means what you think it means...) were fairly bland. All I can find online as a translation/definition for 'goutons' is 'tasty' and 'sampler' and considering the nature of the dish its use here seems incongruous and superfluous at best.

Sorry to put a downer on your day, but it just wasn't that well thought out or executed unfortunately.

Im just gonna add on here that the other reviews here show a complete lack of consistency across the board (and i believe criticism should always be constructive). 'Less is more' as Gordon Ramsay says. He would tell you to cut your menu in half because honestly its huge and the source of all your woes. A dozen dishes done consistently well will always outdo two dozen dishes done...

A night to remember for all the wrong reasons.

The place looks fabulous but the service is appalling. We were told that there would be a 45minute wait on food, which was okay...we could see they were busy and nobody there had food on the table. This was at 7pm by 8:30pm a bit of food was starting to appear on the tables around us and by 9pm our food arrived.

All the meals were fine apart from mine, my mussels came to the table unopened....I think they just needed to be cooked a little longer as the few that were open were very difficult to extract. So I quietly asked a waiter to take the meal away. A few minutes later a waitress returned with my meal to tell me there was nothing wrong with it and that she would happily eat it herself. I still didn’t want to wrestle with the mussels and was told they were unable to offer another meal because the kitchen was closing and offered me a drink. I didn’t want a another drink because I hadn’t eaten and already had a drink in front of me so I asked for a refund. I was told I couldn’t have a refund because the chef would say there was nothing wrong with the food. The chef was never asked.

I know sometimes things go wrong and they were having a very difficult and busy night but 2 hours is a long wait, there were tables with children also waiting this length of time and it seemed everyone around us was in the same boat, waiting for meals.

This could have and should have been handled better. I have given 1 star because I’m unable to post...