Bar Heather — Restaurant in Byron Bay

We had been looking forward to eating at Bar Heather for months and the food certainly didn’t disappoint.

Our server Bernie was delightful, helpful, professional and an asset to the restaurant. We also appreciated one of the sommeliers and their guidance with choosing wine.

Unfortunately there were a few moments that were less than satisfactory. On the wine front, we originally ordered two bottles of wine and whilst the red wine was delivered to us, the white wine didn’t appear until the starters were done with. We also questioned why we were given white wine glasses to drink the red while other patrons were given a red wine glass. It was indicated to us that we hadn’t ordered an expensive enough wine. We found this offensive in itself and interestingly, upon ordering a couple of seperate glasses of red, they were served to us in the correct glasses.

Two of us were sitting on the banquette seating under an air conditioning unit that unfortunately was dripping on us. When we brought this to the attention of the staff, we were told ‘you should have told us earlier’ and ‘we were aware of this problem, it’s the humidity’. There was no apology and then to make this situation more awkward, a mop was brought out and the unit was mopped above our heads, while we were still sitting there. It was quite surreal and very dismissive of us. We still had plates of food and our wine glasses on the table which we had to cover to stop particles dropping into them. The ‘mopping’ was done by the host and her attitude to us was quite surly.

To us, it appeared that as our night went on, certain members of the staff became more dismissive of us. Bernie was the only constant happy face we saw.

The final straw was a hair in our ice cream dish. Incredulously we never received an apology for this from the host. Bernie was finishing his shift and noticed what was happening and apologised and the dish was taken away. We weren’t charged for this dish in our final bill.

We feel such disappointment over our experience at Bar Heather and it is all because of certain members of the staff. The food is amazing. We did receive a biased reply email from the host on that night at Bar Heather who made disparaging comments about our family in it. We are disappointed that she dismissed our concerns which is probably why they only asked for positive reviews to be placed on Google. We feel others...

An otherwise excellent dining experience was marred by a request from a member of the waitstaff that we vacate our table ahead of the allotted 2 hour dining period. I had left the table to visit the toilet with at least 15 minutes to go before the allotted 2 hour dining period had expired and my wife requested another glass of wine. She was told that she couldn’t have another glass as our dining period had expired and people were waiting for our table. When I returned to the table my wife explained what had happened so I informed the closest waitstaff member that we had at least 15 minutes of allotted dining time remaining. She expressed indifference to our plight explaining that the people waiting for our table were ready to sit down. An assistant manager then came to our table and I showed her the booking email noting that the 2 hour dining period still hadn’t expired. She acknowledged that a mistake had been made and apologised with her own palpable air of indifference.

If we had been patrons who had been sitting on one glass of wine each and two plates of snacks for 2 hours I could understand a desire to move us on. But this was not the case. We were spending freely and happily and wanted to spend more. To be told to ‘move on’ in all these circumstances was simply inhospitable.

After several excellent dining experiences at Bar Heather over the years it’s hard to have any enthusiasm to return after having been...

Awesome place for wines, but we found the food to be pretty average, again, their main focus is to be a bar so we understand.

We ordered the set menu costed $95 each, it came with the following dishes: oysters, potato chips, betel leaf with pork, tuna, beef tartare, calamari, quail, sorbet and winter lemon.

The issues that we had with the food started with the tuna, to which we found the dish to contain some fish scales. We brought this issue up to the manager to which they offered to bring us a new dish, but we declined, and she offered to waive this item off from our final bill, and we were happy for her to do that.

The second issue came when we had the raw beef tartare, I understand some sinew is normal but we find that there was an excessive sinew in the raw beef, which I was chewing on for 3-4 mins but had no luck swallowing it down. We spoke to the manager again and decided to return the dish, as we could not finish the dish.

After a few moments, the manager brought out some duck croquettes as a token of apology, she mentioned that it was on the house, which was a nice gesture, so we accepted it, not knowing this would replace the tuna tartare that was supposed to be waived off our final bill.

The quail was beautifully cooked and we ended the night with some interesting desserts.

Overall, anazing service, extensive wine list, not so amazing food. To future customers, this is a wine bar, their main focus is serving...