Village Hotel — Restaurant in Adelaide

Update 14/02/21 Second Review: Booked a table for 6 people @ 6pm. It was like going to a completely different place 😍 Prompt & friendly greeting on arrival, shown to our table, offered to shut the blinds as the sun was quite bright, cutlery & 6 menus already on the extremely clean table. The food was excellent, beautifully presented & well cooked. We had the Grazing Platter & Garlic Bread to share for entree. For mains we had x2 Garlic Prawns & x2 250g Rump Steaks (cooked rare) & (because two of our group don’t eat much), we had a chicken schnitzel cut in half & served on two plates. It didn’t faze them at all to do the halving of the schnitzel into two servings. And, just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, the Duty Manager informed us that the entire meal (including drinks) was taken care of & we didn’t have to pay anything. It literally brought tears to my eyes 🥺. I couldn’t believe how incredibly gracious & generous it was of them. I will definitely be a return customer & would willingly refer people to eat there. Thank you Alanna, you are a star in your field of employment 🌟

Update 22/12/20 I rang & spoke to the duty manager as requested & she was lovely & very apologetic & agreed that we had been ‘let down’ by their staff & hadn’t had a good experience. Alana assured me it was not ‘the norm’ for them & offered a voucher for our next meal, should we decide to return. I have accepted her gracious offer - on the condition that we will only attend on a night when she is on duty. Next review will probably be in 2021 😃

First Review: So, it’s a Sunday night. Booked for 6:45pm, arrived @ 6:35 & waited nearly 10 mins to be acknowledged & directed to our table - not a good start to the evening. Not running at full capacity due to COVID19 restrictions, yet we waited over an hour after I placed an order for 4 meals (1 being from the kids menu). After complaining to the very sweet service person (not the one behind the bar), I was assured it was next on the kitchen docket & was offered a free round of drinks. We were drinking house water & x1 glass lemonade ☹️

The kids meal arrived after 45mins, but we were left hanging for the other three meals for another 20 minutes. 🤬 And there was an appalling lack of effort in ‘presentation’ with the meals.

On top of that, when I ordered our drinks just after placing our meal order, I asked for a tray to carry them to the table - response? “We don’t have trays”, okay then, I’ll just make three trips back & forth from our table then 😡

Then I go to use the toilet - they look grey & just plain grubby & unclean. There was even a piece of toilet paper stuck to the flushing button 🤮 It would take a miracle for us to return here for another meal. The lovely young blonde girl that took our complaint was extremely apologetic & very sweet. Never saw even a hint of the ‘so...

We had an early 5.30 booking - the place was very quiet - we arrived a few minutes before the rest of our party and I wasn’t sure what name it was under so asked whether there was a booking for under the name ‘x’…. There was, however it was up the stairs in the back corner - I knew the birthday boy celebrating his 70th had mobility issues, so said politely I’m not sure that would be it, I might just wait for the others only to be rudely snapped and and told nobody booked with mobility issues and were fully booked…. It wasn’t what was said, but the tone in which it was thrown was disgraceful. Our party arrived, it was unfortunately the back table up the stairs… after several of us supported the birthday boy up the stairs, we went to order drinks. Second in the queue…. 17 minutes later I got back to the table with my 5 drinks (4 of which were post mix soft drinks) - the poor young girl at the bar was obviously new and had been left to her own devices with no support from the snappy staff who had greeted us earlier…. while not busy, it was over 30 minutes before our whole table (only 10 total) were finally seated with their drinks. Floors we’re disgusting and looked like they hadn’t been properly cleaned in months with food remaining under tables from an uncleaned lunch service. One good thing I can say was that the food was lovely, I felt for the poor kitchen staff who were being let down by the poor performance of those on the floor…. There were lots of unhappy conversations heard at tables tonight. The poor wife of the birthday boy had dropped balloons and pictures for the table earlier in the day - none of which were on the table and had to be asked for when we arrived - they were sitting in a back room… all in all an awful experience.

If nothing else, please clean the...

Fine dining, quality and professional service, pleasant atmosphere - at reasonable 'pub' prices!

I attended the Village Hotel in the week before Christmas, and found that despite the restaurant being completely filled and extraordinarily busy, not only did the staff go out of the way to make up a small table for me just to fit me in, but then went out of their way to provide a high-quality, professional and pleasant dining experience.

I was extremely surprised at the quality and taste of their food, as I've had significantly worse when dining in fine-dining (and much more expensive!) restaurants.

The pricing of their meals is very reasonable, and for the quality and the taste, I would have been happy to have paid twice as much!

The customer service was exemplary - from the concierge waiting at the entrance, to the efficiency of the staff taking food and drink orders, to the pleasant, friendly, relaxed and happy demeanour of the staff when serving (the staff actually seemed happy to be working there and serving customers...).

I feared, when i initially saw four large tables of more than ten people lining up to order their meals ahead of me, and for the staff member taking orders to advise me that there may be a wait on my order due to the number of people, that I would be waiting in excess of an hour for food. I must confess to initially being rather pessimistic about this, yet I was very happy to be pleasantly surprised to find my order coming out in less than 30 minutes, with no obvious compromises on quality!

Fantastic work Village Hotel and your staff! You definitely made my day!

All-in-all, their restaurant is very deserving of more than the five stars, and I hope that others make the effort to experience it for...