Institut Polaire — Restaurant in Hobart

Tasmania trip (last minute as usual due to ever changing covid restrictions 🤦🤣). Dinner at @institutpolairetasmania - amazing food with lots of Asian ingredients/flavours, and a great drinks selection (delicious cocktails!). Service was excellent - efficient and friendly. . Brioche bun, miso butter, laver oil: the bread was super soft as you'd expect from a brioche. The miso butter was very tasty! . Sea urchin, tamago, creme fraiche: I'm not normally a huge fan of sea urchin, but this was excellent. I think the tamago and the creme fraiche softened the sea urchin flavour and texture for me. Excellent dish. . Scallop sashimi, yuzu, white soy, sesame, lovage: these scallops were absolutely fantastic! I loved it 😍. . Rock lobster cocktail (+99$): we normally enjoy Chinese style lobster much more than western style, but this lobster was so good! Especially half of it is a whole piece of lobster meat, and the other half was made into a lobster salad. Very nicely done. Definitely it's something you should get if you're looking to splurge a little bit 😜😜😜. . Burrata, apricot, mirin, coriander seed: lovely soft and gooey burrata, which worked really well with the tartness and sweetness of the apricot. . Homemade pasta: saffron handkerchief pasta, walnut butter, duck egg yolk. The pasta was nicely done. The duck egg yolk with the walnut butter was gloriously creamy and delicious! Super yummy 😋😋😋. . Cape Grim eye fillet, pink eye, black garlic, with radicchio salad. This beef was perfectly cooked - rare and super tender. The flavours were nice and bold with the black garlic sauce. Amazing! The mashed potatoes was like a whipped texture - it was so soft and light 😮😮! Never had anything like that before. . Dessert: Leatherwood honey panna cotta, spiced cherry. The panna cotta was very soft, and the flavour was delicate. The cherries were a nice touch. Nice way to end...

This was nice, but I wouldn't go again.

I was a little surprised that the two entrees were both bread based, and while our waiter was very knowledgeable, we were rushed to finish our drinks. Not metaphorically- we were told "Just so you know, I'll need that carafe in a little bit", so I had to gulp down half a glass of wine to accommodate an apparent lack of serving vessels (?!). It really should've been obvious by the second drink that we were struggling to keep up with the pace that was demanded of us.

On the brighter side, the heirloom tomato with sorbet was to die for, and the peach with mozzarella and rosemary was an inspired and refreshing dish. The dessert was a lemon meringue tart, paired with an overly lemony cocktail, which really felt out of place- all of the other pairings made sense, but it was far too much lemon to finish the meal with, and I spent the drive home feeling as though I'd just sucked on a warhead.

As our meal progressed, different waiters cleared our plates, and replaced cutlery with new cutlery- regardless of the fact that it'd been replaced not five minutes earlier by a different waiter, with a plate being whisked away just before our dessert with an explanation of "Oh, you won't need that". At one point, the wine bottle was also left with us, and then taken away once they realised (not that we had the drinking stamina and speed to take advantage of the unattended and very delicious wine)! Everyone was very friendly and personable, but it was disorganised, and lacked attention to detail- like the rather distracting peeling wall behind us, it detracted from what was otherwise a very...

The worst service I've ever experienced. If I wanted to be ignored for an hour and insulted by staff and boomers, I'd stay in Sydney. I was so looking forward to Institut Polaire. My wife and I booked a table at 3pm - right when the bar opens-to ensure we'd get a table. We were very keen to try the drinks and food. When we arrived, we were perturbed to find that we were seated as close to the door as humanly possible, although there were other free tables available. Not great on a cold winter night when we booked in advance. Especially since the other free tables weren't reserved. We ordered a sizable amount of food and several drinks at 7pm. At 7:30pm, a group of four entitled boomers without a booking decided to force themselves onto a tiny table for two next to us. The waitress who had taken our order asked us to move closer to the drafty and freezing door to accommodate the impolite interlopers, but we refused. But they continued to squeeze in anyway. The boomers sat practically on our laps and started their evening. At 750 (almost an hour after we first ordered) the waitress came over to confirm our food order. We were shocked as we'd ordered nearly an hour ago. She confirmed that the order had not made it to the kitchen and no one had even started making our food. At this point, we asked to leave. We weren't about to wait another hour in a cramped, dark, expensive hipster den while the wait staff accommodated to the whims of rude patrons while ignoring those who had booked far in advance and we're ready to spend hundreds at what paints itself as an upmarket institution. Institut Polaire:...