Popeye's Fish and Chips Takeaway — Restaurant in Hamilton Island

We’ve eaten here a number of times before. It’s usually been decent – not amazing, but it suited the location. This time I thought I’d sit down and give it a proper review.

The setting is great – right on the main street overlooking the marina. You can order through the app or line up, and the place swings between busy and quiet in waves.

This visit we ordered: • Beer battered fish with house tartare and lemon (I swapped chips for salad) • Hamilton Island beef burger with chips • Potato scallops (x2) • Corona and ginger beer

Unfortunately, they messed up the order – timing was off, parts were forgotten, and while they offered an upsized chips to make up for it, these were forgotten too. And it wasn’t even busy.

The fish batter itself was spot on – crisp and golden – but the fish inside had the texture of something frozen. The tartare was tasty though. The “salad” was laughable: served in what looked like an ice cream cup, old and bland, missing the basics. The burger was “the worst burger she’s ever had” according to my better half. Didn’t seem like fresh ingredients. The paddy texture was off and flavour bland

The potato scallops were actually good, the chips just average. You’d get better anywhere off the island.

That said, it’s still a nice place to sit inside or outside, soak up the marina views, and enjoy a drink. Just beware of the swooping wildlife – they’re ruthless if you sit outside with food.

Overall: a great spot, but the food execution and service let it down...

I'm not normally pedantic about service however the cashier widened her eyes in disbelief at me asking which fish they had available for their fish of the day - which one assumes changes daily. Had two meals - one of barramundi (labelled mackeral) and one of snapper (labelled perch). Truth be told I don't know for sure which type of fish I received. On top of this the calamari was far worse than I've had at the cheapest fish and chip stores. The "snapper" was rubbery and gross, though to be fair I may just not enjoy the taste of that specific fish (which I would love to know the name of for sure so I could avoid wasting my money on a resort island again). The chips were okay, but a little undercooked. The "barramundi" was pretty tasty. So that's cool I guess. V expensive, not worth, would not recommend. Made me feel sick for the entire day.

Edit: forgot to say, tried to feed some of the fish to a cockatoo n even he didn't...

It was good that they offered some non-fried options like a sushi box or Greek salad. We had lunch there and order a chips and a "chicken chippies" for the two kids and a Greek salad for us to share. The salad was good and fresh. The chips and chicken chippies came in one box with one small container of tomato sauce. When I asked for more tomato sauce they wanted to charge me $2 for a larger container of sauce. I said I only needed another little one but they wouldn't give me one, insisted I could only buy the bigger one. I'm sure if we had ordered the chips and the chicken chips on separate orders they would have each come with a little container so they were just trying to extract more cash which just seemed nasty and unnecessary considering they are constantly busy as the only takeaway other than pizza. I refused to pay $2 for more ketchup and that interaction along with the average fried food gets them...