Shearwater Restaurant — Restaurant in Heron Island

Edit for Jan 2024 visit.

What a difference a year has made. I was very happy with our dining experience this time.

The menu has been drastically reduced since our visit in 2023, we tried almost everything on the menu (mains) and everything was good. It's wasn't gourmet dining but the price reflected the quality of the meal as opposed to 2023 when meals were very costly and of poor quality.

Everything tasted good, everything was properly prepared - No complaints at all.

Breakfast was spot on. They have real milk on the island for coffees and they made sure everything was well stocked.

It's great to see so many improvements to the restaurant!

Jan 2023 visit Expensive and extremely inconsistent.

Uncooked chips without salt, long waits, limited menu with items unavailable despite a brand new menu (imagine releasing a new menu but not being able to cook it all on the first 3 nights…), staff and kitchen mixing up orders, half cooked salmon. It wasn’t great.

The buffet breakfast was limited but ok. Staff struggled to keep it stocked but if you wait you generally got something, sometimes cold..

However you’re not there for the restaurant. Just manage your expectations. It may not be great but everything else in the resort is good and the island and...

The food for the main meals was...odd.

The combination of ingredients in many of the main dishes were not well thought out. I had a meal that consisted of penne pasta, topped with mostly sour cream, a little bit of tomato sauce, and a small amount of lamb. It was like an episode of Chopped, where the chef was given a basket of random ingredients in different amounts and was asked to make a dish. Except Chopped has world class chefs competing and this island has someone who may also be the mechanic. ~$40.

There's also this tendency to make dishes look fancier on the plate by pureeing vegetables and putting it on the bottom of the plate. Plain, pureed carrots aren't fancy, it's just baby food.

I wouldn't normally be so harsh, but this is the only eating option on this island, you aren't allowed to bring your own food, I was trapped there for extra days at my expense because of high winds, and the food was expensive.

The service was...

This place either must have changed a lot in recent times or some former reviewers have no grasp at reality. Coming to Heron Island, we were already resigned to a mediocre culinary experience, but that sentiment was completely unfounded. The breakfast buffet was amazing, the lunch menu offered nice snacks for reloading and the dinner menu was just phenomenal. Lots of different creative dishes, some of which consisting of a combination of ingredients we had never seen before. Of course it's a bit pricey (you're on an island), but that's well worth it. Extra shoutout to the crew, most of which are obviously not trained for service and have double-roles as skippers or diving instructors. All of them were lovely people and that made up for any small mistakes...