Leyla Bar — Restaurant in District of Canberra Central

This was an extraordinarily mediocre experience. From the get go, the lady at the front entrance with the red tattoo on the back of her right upper arm who was greeting customers did so to us without a smile and had a degree of reluctance of people turning up to visit. We just got pointed to where we were meant to sit. This just didn’t start our visit out right, especially against the backdrop of such a gorgeous venue. Next, they didn’t check that the number of seats (5 seats, 6 reserved guests) was wrong compared to the booking we made online weeks in advance, since, well, we we just got told to make our way over to our table while said staff member then leant over the bar on her phone. I'm all for staff being casual and relaxed, but just watching them during the event I found they had zero awareness of patrons trying to wave them down on their way past, served wine to another member of our table that was extremely past its' prime (to their credit they did realise and opened up a new bottle and replace the $28 glass of wine), and generally, seemed to lack any desire to actually be there.

On the food front, it was unfortunately tasteless and expensive, $19 for two Cole’s brioche buns and some prawn salad. On my way to the bathroom I noticed these prawn buns were just sitting on the counter without cooling or shielding from passer by's sneezes or anything. This is besides the issue that half the food menu (the good part) wasn't available when we were there.

The drinks were expensive and weak, and for $24 definitely not worth more than Molly down the road where the drinks are made with a great attention to detail, and actually taste nice. The drinks were watered down with mixers. The drinks are made to look nice, and that's about it.

Lastly, arbitrary service fees are added to the online ordering system they use. What was a $21 cocktail ends up being $24 on the Sunday we went. I wasn't sure if it was a Sunday surcharge or not (it just said venue surcharge), but this is just something else to be mindful of.

The only redeeming quality here was the design of the venue which was gorgeous, and if that’s your jam, so be it - otherwise I’d suggest going to literally any of the other fantastic cocktail bars across Canberra. If anything, get a table here, maybe a tap beer, and enjoy the view before heading elsewhere. It's such a shame, as going into this place I was so excited since it was a gorgeous day and the photos online...

Disappointing experience. After miscommunication between a friend and I, we both thought the other person had booked in for the bottomless experience on a Saturday afternoon. Once we worked out there was no booking we asked the waitress if we could get a table, she seemed agitated and told us we could have a table but needed to give it back after 90min. We were taken to said table only to see that the one next to us was reserved for 3.5 hours later. We then asked if we could still do the bottomless experience. Her reply was that the kitchen wouldn't be able to handle it (even though there was just 2 of us and you could still order food off the regular menu?!). There is no mention on any of Leyla Bars emails or social media that it is ESSENTIAL to book into bottomless. I would say that maybe half of the room was doing bottomless, so it didn't seem like it would be that much more difficult for us to do it. We decided to stay and order a cocktail and some snacks from the kitchen anyway. About ten minutes into this we noticed that the large group next to us had a booking for 6 people to do the bottomless experience but then had about 2-3 extra guests. Apparently this was fine for them to be included even though we couldn't. Safe to say we won't be...

TLDR: I told them I’m allergic to nuts; they told me the food I was ordering didn’t contain nuts; and it in fact did (and I ate it)!🙃

I was told the crackers and cheese did not contain nuts as I’m allergic (I told the staff about my allergy, and that I’m anaphylactic). After eating them I felt sick and double checked with the head chef, who initially told me there were just seeds, and THEN checked the package of the crackers and said “oh, almond meal.” There was no apology from the chef, however the girl at the door was extremely apologetic. I was lucky I didn’t have to use my epipen and go to hospital.

The manager later came over to talk, apologised and said that they hadn’t really checked the ingredients properly (or some similar excuse). He took my details and said he’d call me the next day, but that didn’t happen…

Aside from the stress of almost having to use my epipen, if it happened to someone else with a worse allergy, they could have died. Completely negligent.

Shoutout to the lovely girl at the door who was the only one who took responsibility (even though it wasn’t her fault), apologised, and kept checking on me.

0/10 experience will never...