Iyara By Sakare Thai cuisine — Restaurant in Cairns City

Staff were were friendly and service was welcoming but the food was a let down unfortunately.

ENTREE

Tempura prawn in beetle leaf, garnished with toasted coconut, peanuts, lime and chilli.

I was a little disappointed with this dish as it has such great potential. The flavours were good with hints of Thai dressing lime and coconut with a nice hit of spice as an end note. But no Prawn?

The prawn was half a tail of a medium sized prawn in each serve and was extremely overwhelmed by the garnishes.

With a big juicy prawn, less garnished this dish would have been a big hit.

Vegetable Springrolls.

Nice and fresh but pretty average as a typical spring roll.

MAIN MEAL

Cashew Nut Chicken with Vegetables and chilli (Only thing my wife eats lol)

Again disappointed with this dish. The chicken are small pieces battered and deep fried chicken. I’m the sauce the batter went soggy.

Also there were very little vegetables in the cashew chicken. Moreover, the chilli end note was lacking if present at all.

I found it difficult to enjoy this dish as I was really looking forward to a Thai style fresh chicken cashew nut with beautiful wok tossed vegetables (broc, red capsicum, zucchini, carrots, EP, etc) and fresh chilli and coriander.

The dish was not fresh and reminded me of a Chinese style battered chicken at a food court buffet.

Coconut rice - was typical of your standard coconut rice.

The price of these dishes were up there too. Again added to my thinking the dishes were going to be beautiful.

Although the staff are beautiful and really welcoming. Unfortunately for me I did not have the Thai experience I was looking for. Other dishes may have been better but I didn’t try anything else.

This review is purely my own honest opinion, others may have had a different...

Have given one star as I can’t give anything less. Whole dining experience was a disaster. Very mediocre food and flavours. Satay chicken was bland and dry. After that we had over an hour wait for the rest of the food to arrive. When we checked with the young waiter, he came back saying he couldn’t give a time frame and that it shouldn’t be too long. Waited another ten minutes and spoke to a waitress asking to cancel the rest of our order and that we would pay for the satay. She replied saying she needed to check if that could be done. Came back saying food was being dished out. Food arrived after another five minutes. When I asked to speak to the manager /chef, she came to the table and apologised with the pathetic excuse that due to an internet problem our order didn’t reach the kitchen. Seemed like a fib as the satay arrived and the rest took a million years. When the food was on the table, it was lukewarm and certainly not worth the wait. Prawns and chicken dishes tasted the same. Prawns were hard. Chicken had no flavour. Veggies made everything look colourful. It was served without enough cutlery. Table water was promptly poured out as another pathetic apology. Poor, young (looked like teenagers) waiters had no idea what to do. Manager was so poor in her customer service. Another table behind ours waited for what seemed like ages for their order to arrive too. We finally left feeling cheated paying for an overpriced meal and our time. Would never 👎 go back here again even for a free meal. Overpriced, so called Thai with poor customer, such long waits that you lose your appetite and no regard for a family with an overtired child. Don’t bother wasting your time or money here. You would just be paying for...

Disappointing. Great location, Great ambience, and Great view get one star each. Cannot hive marks for food or service. Dismal wait time and food and service were mediocre. I tried hard to finish my meal because it was so expensive - $32 for a Tom Yum soup - but couldn’t because it was so super horribly salty that every mouthful was uncomfortable, and the prawns were over cooked and tough. My friend’s expensive ($38) smallish whole fish no accompaniments other than rice, was also over cooked and tough and the oil it was deep fried in wasn’t a great dining experience. We asked for glasses of wine but they got it wrong and brought a bottle we didn’t order. We arrived early at the start of the night when the restaurant was quite empty, but ended up being served long after the restaurant filled and other tables that arrived well after us were served their meals. Our entree of scallops was yummy and promising of delicious food to follow. They really got our digestive juices flowing, but we had to wait so long between the entree and the mains that it became uncomfortable. We then got a complete let down once we saw and tasted our mains. We’ve decided to give them one more try because we really loved the location, but if it’s not up to scratch on the second chance we will be giving it a miss in future. It’s too expensive to be served mediocre food and given...