Cali Beach — Restaurant in Gold Coast City

I attended with a large group of people for a work function in one of the 4 cabana VIP areas.

Considering the very warm and humid weather we've been having recently I was most disappointed the place was designed so that the open back and front of these cabanas face north/south rather than east/west meaning inside the cabana you basically get none of the cool sea breeze whatsoever.

To add insult to injury they have no fan either (an oscillating wall fan or two would be a nice addition), so at times when I needed to cool down I had to go and stand outside.

There is nowhere near enough bar staff so everyone had to wait so long for a drink that many ended up just ordering two at a time to save waiting again.

We got the juice bar which came with a waitress so really in that kind of situation what they should do is they should ask what everyone's drink preference is and bring those drinks to the cabana so we have our own waitress serving it AT the cabana. Making so called VIPs wait in the bar line-up like everyone else is poor form.

The food took FOREVER to come out and when it did it only came in dribs and drabs. The food itself was great and I have no complaints about the quality of the food but for heaven's sake put more people on in the kitchen.

All of the food was ordered pretty much at the same time shortly after we arrived and at that stage there would have been less than 60 people there. I was told the venue has a capacity for 600 people so this means they were at 10% capacity when we ordered the food and it's still took several hours for everything to come out. Pretty pathetic.

Overall not impressed at all considering my boss spent several thousand dollars and barely received any kind of "VIP treatment".

It's fine if you're in your late teens or early 20s (that seems to be the target demographic considering the venue design and music selection) and want to casually go somewhere to have a few drinks and a swim with friends, but that's where it ends. Yeah sure you can order food but be prepared to wait a completely unreasonable amount of time for it.

The music I suppose was average for a venue like this, the DJ played a lot of teeny-bopper bubble-gum pop trash but most clubs do these days. I will give him some credit for throwing a few oldskool classics in there as well. At least we had the ability to control the speaker volume in the cabana so we could turn it down a bit to actually hear one another without yelling.

SCORES Venue design and layout: 6/10 Venue cleanliness: 7/10 Staff friendliness: 8/10 Staffing numbers: 3/10 (pay less people to stand around and show-off their ass and more people to actually serve patrons) Food quality: 7/10 Food wait times: 1/10 -- The worst I've seen for...

This is all extremely, poorly organised. I would say save your money and go elsewhere. From our initial booking up until the day of, worst communication. We booked a deck booth, and pre-ordered our bottles & food as required, we went over our minimum spend but mentioned we were happy to pay the excess. Over email, they confirmed our food & beverages and said we can pay the excess on the day when we arrive. On the day, our "host" Kyle, said to us, we were over our minimum spend limit so we had to take bottles & food off to make sure you were under. We showed him the email and instead of rectifying the issue, he said "oh well, just scan the QR code & order more if you want" seemed fine, however, when we scanned the QR code, they did not have all the same bottles, so now we missed out on what we wanted. Most importantly, we were told our booking is 12pm - 6pm. We arrived at 12.10pm. We did not see any of our alcohol or food until about 1.25pm. It was over an hour wait. Our supposed host was Kyle, however he was rude and useless. Could never answer any of our questions or he would say, he will come back in 10-minutes and never did.... Our booking was also supposed to include beach towels for the day, upon walking in, I noticed some beds had them already. When we arrived to our booth we had none. EVENTUALLY when our bottle lady arrived (more than an hour late) we asked about the towels but she had no idea, she had to flag down Kyle... We spoke to Kyle twice about the towels and only ever received 1 for 6 people!! When I questioned kyle the second time he said "we need to wait for them to come up from the basement, they get cleaned & dried each day". But my point is, we made a booking, you knew for months that we were coming, I would assume 99% of the people there had made a booking. So you should know how many towels you would need on this day, they should have been pre-set. Also to note, our booking was till 6pm, however, our bottle lady packed everything up just before 5:30pm including all our mixers so we couldn't even have soft drink, juice or water for the last 30-minutes of our booking. (remembering that for more than an hour at the beginning of our booking we didn't see any host, food or drink we felt like sitting ducks and we kept asking staff for assistance and they just kept saying "we'll send your host over". But no host ever came) we some what feel robbed of the experience. It was such a waste of money, nothing glamour's, it's all very run down & the pool is...

I won a birthday package here by entering a competition 🙂 I was soo happy to recieve the news and couldnt wait to celebrate here as everyone I knew always wanted to go here but now we had the oppertunity too. Communication from Cassandra Saville was great at the start 👍 .Until melaine started emailing and I wasnt getting replys only up until the week and day of the party. I tried calling the number provided but it was invalid so I was unable to contact anyone to communicate anything. I was emailed back the day of the party to say I could set up 30 minutes prior to the party starting which was inconvienient for me as I would of had to set it up myself with the short notice they had given me. Which is the very last thing I needed to worry about on the day. We were running late and I had recieved a call which I was very pleased they reached out. I had arrived with my photgrapher & he was denied entry which is my fault for overseeing prohibited video and SLRcamera please dont make the same mistake.My host came to the entry desk and introduced himself and 2 way radio the MOD about allowing my photgrapher in . The manager on duty allowed him to be on site aslong as he didnt take photos of others which I was so grateful for. My host then pointed to my designated area and I never seen the host again which was very dissappointing. Half my guests didnt recieve there complimentray drink or wristbands even when my name was mentioned to the person at the entry desk. The food was already on the table when we had arrived which was fine as we were the ones who were running late but it was still eaten 😁 which was a good sign that the food was good 🤌 The views and place is stunning and the bartenders serving us were great . I was a bit dissapointed at the area that was given as I felt it was more of a public space then a private space but that was my only personal opinion I had hoped that I had more of a private area around the pool side as there was ones avaliable. I would give this place another chance but I felt let down by the communication & host , despite all this my guests and myself had...