Hugo Dining Restaurant Essendon — Restaurant in Melbourne

Gone are the days where you can go to a nice restaurant and have a nice, relaxing time amongst friends whilst enjoying a meal - at least, that’s how it is at this place. The food is actually quite delicious and can’t be faulted at all. What lets this place down is the service and the atmosphere. It feels like a production line where all the staff seem to care about is to make the customers place their order as quickly as possible, eat as quickly as possible, and then leave as quickly as possible so that they can get the next set of people in - it’s about churning it all out so that the most amount of money can be made. The tables are all packed in together to try and fit in as many in the space as possible, but what the owners fail to realise is that it makes it incredibly awkward for the customers to get in or out from their table for fear of bumping into the other guests - and god help you if one of your friends are running a little late - you end up with multiple staff coming up to you pushing you and reminding you of the amount of time you have for the table - even if the place clearly has empty tables available for walk-ins. Then, once you have ordered your food, you end up having to wait 20 minutes for it to arrive and yet again you are pushed to get eating and go. Forget about wanting dessert - there’s no time, and I wish that I was exaggerating, but I’m not.

As a local to the area, I love eating out locally. This is the 2nd time that I’ve eaten here, and I only went because it was where my friend wanted to go for her birthday, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered as this was the same experience as the first time.

If you want to be rushed, put under pressure, and hassled by the staff regularly, only for your meal to take 20 minutes, then rushed to leave, then this is the place for you. If not, there are plenty of other places to go and enjoy a nice...

Good food. Good serving sizes. Bad service. Was constantly bothered by wait staff, asking the same questions multiple times by multiple people, cleaning the table/removing plates, napkins and EVERYTHING that we might not have been using, whilst eating and always ‘hovering’ over us.

Our booking was a 2 hour seating, from 6pm for 8 people. It was confirmed through our email reservation that we had to leave 5 minutes prior to the next session.

At 7:30, the bill was bought to our table and we were told we had to start moving. At 7:40, the wait staff brought over the eftpos machine (!!!!) (we wanted to pay cash so that was silly to assume) and asked for payment. At 7:50, we were told we had to leave because people were waiting. I told them about the information provided on the email confirmation. After getting up to leave, the manager apologised because he checked what the confirmation said and we were right, we had the table until 7:55.

You would think with this service the restaurant was full and there was a group waiting to sit at our warm seats. There was no one waiting for us. There were many other empty tables.

Spending $50 per person, this service was definitely not worth it and the food was not enough to save the bad taste...

Atmosphere: not bad if you want a lovely atmosphere, but if you're looking for quiet and intimate this isn't your place. Sadly we were looking for the latter and were disappointed but this isn't a knock on the establishment, we didn't do our research on this.

Staff: polite, attentive, fantastic.

Food: this is where we have some issues. The steak was amazing. Cooked exactly as asked and came quickly. No issue there.

We had a focaccia which was also sublime.

The fettucini carbonara though. This was the biggest disappointment of the evening. On the website it looks great and fresh. As described. What was served, smelt and tasted like packet pasta with some fried pancetta placed on top. I'm not exaggerating here, there's a distinct taste and smell to powdered pasta sauce and this was very similar. My fiance who is normally a carbonara lover, couldn't stomach it. It looks nothing like you see on the menu, and I'm not talking about presentation - instead of a normally rich carbonara sauce what was served was a stiff, gluggy salty and overly yellow mess.

To our fault, we didn't say anything at the time. I was tired and wanted to get home.

But unless proven wrong I'd suggest steering clear of that dish, everything else we...