Commercial Hotel Dubbo — Restaurant in Dubbo

Staff seem nice enough but unfortunately that's the only positive. Extremely long wait time for meals to be served - almost an hour and a half - On a Sunday night! 20mins just to order and there were only three people ahead. First dish was a kids pizza which was cold and had barely any toppings. We are definitely not precious but this is honestly bad enough for us to write this review.

I replied to the Commercial Hotel email as requested. I did not receive any acknowledgment.

As requested, please see below my contact details. Its not normally my go to leave negative feedback for anything but our experience at the Commercial Hotel was extremely bad.

This is a brief summary of our night: • Our second night in Dubbo, we looked at a few different bistros and based on the majority of good reviews chose the Commercial. We didn’t pre-book. • Upon arrival we (My wife, myself and our 3 kids) were greeted by a man who I assume was some type of manager or perhaps the publican. He was very accommodating and found us a table pretty quick. • We bought a round of drinks and checked out the menu. • When we lined up to order there was 3 different small groups of people in front of us. We remained in this line for close to 30 minutes. During this time we observed many meals just sitting on the counter and nobody coming to get them, strange we thought. The girls taking the orders were friendly but appeared to be a little disorganised. • After about an hour I went to check to see what was happening. There were still a heap of random meals on the counter. I asked the girl if our order was ready and she said only the pizza (My daughter’s dinner) and that ours wouldn’t be long. I got it back to the table and had a look at it, it was very lean of all pizza ingredients and was stone cold. I took it back and asked if we could have another one as this one was terrible. The girl apologised and said it wouldn’t be a problem. • ½ hour later, the buzzer still hadn’t rang. I went back up and sure enough, still heaps of random food on the counter. By this time there were more people asking similar questions to the staff regarding their meals. They gave me a freshly made pizza which was hot and full of toppings (a vast improvement). Our food still wasn’t ready. • My daughter ate her pizza whilst we (all starving) watched her. • 10 minutes later our buzzer went off. I went to the counter and picked up our 3 out of our 4 remaining meals. I had to ask again for the missing meal. They had no idea there was one missing. • When I got back to the table my meal was really cold. I returned to the counter (still with random food all over the counter and several dissatisfied people standing around) and asked for it to be reheated. I asked her what was going on because their service was very bad. She replied “Sorry, we have been really busy tonight, we had over 200 orders and then raffled off some rubbish about the chef having issues”. After standing there for another 5 minutes, I had to ask her to retrieve my meal from the microwave. By that time the final meal was thrown onto the counter also. • I took them back and we ate most of our respective meals. Barring the second pizza, the other meals were all very average in both presentation and taste. • We finished as quick as we could and ran out.

Looking back, it was obvious that there were problems in the kitchen well before we arrived. As a minimum, it would have been nice to be informed of the long wait times when we ordered. My family and I often go to pubs for meals and we have never had a worse experience. If there was an option for zero stars on the Google review I would have...

We were recommended this hotel from our Airbnb host as we were from out of town and needed somewhere to eat for the night. I reserved a table and when we arrived, my friend and I were really confused about how the seating/service worked. We went up to the bar and got some drinks, asked about our reservation and were seated - name spelt wrong on the reservation card btw (Kylie not Kyle lol) and I’d emailed them to request the courtyard instead of the Saloon, and got the Saloon anyways (no biggie as it was a windy night and inside suited us better).

We placed our order at the kitchen, and because it was a 20min wait, asked for a serve of chips immediately because we were famished from our 7hr travel that day. The server was lovely and got that organised for us asap. But when our mains arrived… OMG!!! My halloumi burger bun was burnt and the burger smelt funny. I ate the ingredients of my burger and left the burnt bun as I was starving. My friend’s beef burger was undercooked and had the plastic cheese slice on there (so processed and so 80’s). My friend returned her burger and got a refund. They offered to cook her another one but we just didn’t want to wait (or risk getting another shitty meal). As well as that, our plates were covered in finger smudges and looked grubby. We did however, enjoy a nice glass of wine each. To sum it up, won’t be...

Sunday night my husband and I and a few of his mates from the cricket team went in for dinner as we had just arrived from Sydney, the tall lady behind the counter at the restaurant was so helpful, one of my husbands friends is Coeliac and when he mentioned this to the girl, she was so understanding and made sure that everyone in the kitchen was aware in order to prevent cross contamination, she was also just extremely polite and accommodating, so we went back again last night (Monday) and my husband told the rest of the team and they mentioned it to the other teams and I saw most of them there last night. The two guys at the bar were lovely and the same girl behind the counter at the bistro was again fantastic- they were so busy in the kitchen and she kept a smile on her face the whole time! The woman and men who were cooking in the kitchen did a fantastic job to keep up with all the orders and even though there was a sign about an extended wait time and the lady at the counter let us know, we really didn’t wait that long. Hats off to all staff at the Commercial Sunday and Monday night, we will be back every night we are in town and most definitely when we come back through here. The Commercial has certainly had a facelift and personnel improvement since the last time we were here (a...