Palette Restaurant — Restaurant in Gold Coast City

I rarely find myself so disappointed to actually leave a review for a hatted fine dining space. Palette, nestled in the ground floor of the HOTA galleries, has the vibe of a gallery cafe - guests peering through into the space, busy elevators coming and going, greatly shifting the ambience expected of a ‘3 Hat’ restaurant.

While the staff were friendly, there was a distinct feeling of the poor lovely manager having to train multiple very green (but sweet natured) young staff on shift with him. This resulted in multiple errors, forgotten dishes, delays and issues with our ordering and experience. It’s also worth noting that there was significant wait between courses (minimum 25 minutes) for dishes that have mostly pre-prepped morsels - like a duck wing, or duck porridge, things that straight up don’t take that long. I would have been much more understanding if the venue was busy, but it wasn’t. I also just really disliked the duck nugget dish, it felt cheap, was way under seasoned and generally not something I would expect to see in a fine dining restaurant.

The most frustrating part is that the whole experience, in its clunky design, took three hours - and we didn’t even do the tasting menu, as we were discouraged from that by the young water due to dietary restrictions (that we notified the restaurant upon booking several days prior). The complimentary dessert was lovely and by far the highlight of the meal but it didn’t sweeten the experience enough - if you’re going to Palette, be ready to fork out some big money for some very underwhelming food and friendly but...

The serving staff at Palette were lovely and assisted us well.

The food was largely over flavoured and rich, which were not used to from a self identitfied "high calibre" France restaurant.

The Korean salt bread was amazing, however the amount of butter to bread was significantly out of balance. You would need another roll to use 2/3 of it without smothering it.

The Kangaroo, which was Prosciutto-esk, but rawer, was poorly described in the menu. It was also covered in cream dollops, making the whole experience really overwhelming. There is a balance to additive items vs the source and this was well out of balance to the point of making us feel ill.

The Mushroom miso soup in the "drink me" bottles was great, however, the beef tartar was odd.

The lamb was good, but over sauced. The Wagyu was amazing but overly fatty.

Finally the dessert of gelato, and mouse was extremely rich and poorly balanced.

If you go for ala carte I believe you would have a better experience. However from the tasting menu we were overwhelmed and left feeling a bit sick from the richness.

Drinks - the cocktails we had were very good. The Champagne that the restaurant was pushing/advertising Perrier-Jouët was very sweet and must have had sulphates and more preservatives than normal and was not great.

Overall, we might go back if we are at HOTA again and cannot find anywhere else, but against other restaurants of the same calibre that we've been to...

We’ve been to Palette several times and each time had positive experience so we went there again last night (27/03/24) to entertain a guest visiting from overseas. The meal was fine but less memorable than in our previous visits. For dessert, our guest ordered a small cheese platter and that was when the problem occurred. He was told the platter had Gruyère, Gouda (but could have been cheddar from its orange colour) and blue cheese. When our guest started slicing the first two, he said they did not look right. I checked and they were definitely stale, dry and very hard. I called one of the waitresses and complained. She took the plate and later came back to say we will not be charged for the platter and our guest can continue eating the blue cheese as it looks ok. One: This should never happen in a true fine dining restaurant. It is not rocket science to slice cheese and it is fairly obvious when they are past their useful date! Two: A fine dining restaurant should have offered an alternative dessert instead of returning the platter. Three: I took the initiative to talk to the Manager about this incident. It should have been the...