Rockpool Bar & Grill Melbourne — Restaurant in Melbourne

ORDERED Nov 2023: 🍟 Steak tartare with 12 month Pyengana Cheddar and Potato Crisps ($36.00) 🥩 Cape Grim Dry Aged 36 Month Old Grass Fed: Rib eye on the bone 400g, 47 days ($95.00) 🥔  Sauteed Dobson's Potatoes with garlic, rosemary and wagyu fat ($19.00) 🥗 Radicchio, Cos and Endive Salad with Burnt Honey Vinaigrette ($16.00)

I spent $138.96 here.

REVIEW: ❌ My rib eye was strangely not as juicy as the scotch! My understanding is that they're from very similar areas of the cattle, with scotch noted as the "boneless rib-eye". That day, the rib eye was noticeably drier. The complimentary hot english & seeded mustard made it more bearable, but it's not the best rib eye I've ever had. ❤ The Sauteed Dobson's potato is still phenomenal and is enough to split between two.

Service although dressed to the nine's, seems too new. It's my fourth time at Rockpool and I found the service a little awkward, with multiple faces coming throughout the dining service. It seems more casual and toned down than when I first went 3 years ago.

Although they identified whose birthday it was between me/my partner, they did nothing else to make it special. 😊 ORDERED Apr 2023: 🐟  Crudo of Hiramasa Kingfish with smoked oysters mayonnaise nd karkalla ($39.00)

🦞 Wood fire grilled Tasmanian Rock Lobster with Garlic Butter 850g ($230.00) 🥩 Cape Grim Dry Aged 36 Month Old Grass Fed: Rib eye on the bone 400g, 52 days ($95.00) 🥕 Roasted carrots with thyme, garlic and hazelnuts ($19.00) 🥔  Sauteed Dobson's Potatoes with garlic, rosemary and wagyu fat ($18.00)

I spent $133.67 here.

REVIEW: A very fine establishment. Service is professional, friendly and everyone looks very smart. They remind you to arrive in their smart casual dress code.

The steak is my favourite and the best dish at Rockpool. Rib eye is incredibly tender and cooked deliciously. This is the third time I've been back, and I credit them to moving me away from the iconic mushroom sauce and onto mustard. With lots of complimentary mustard options from seeded, to dijon and english, you can find something to your liking. Compared to mushroom sauce, it drowns out the earthy steak flavour. However if you have a smear of mustard, you can enjoy the earthy taste yet add some interest to every steak bite. Give it a try! Potatoes were surprisingly and wonderfully crunchy. I didn't expect it to hold its crunch since it was sauteed, but there's something otherworldly magic going on. A must order side dish!

Rockpool provides you with the tools to pick at your own lobster. Although they carve up the main meaty parts, you can choose from your kit to ensure you get all the meat inside the legs. There's surprisingly a lot of meat! The most amount of meat I've ever seen in a lobster. Don't waste the legs. However, with the time it takes to pick out the legs your mouth does get that gritty dry taste that unfortunately comes with the territory.

We skipped dessert because we were way too full from the...

The night started with a cocktail I know about, as have it often, a Negroni. Unfortunately, it came watered down, as if they are trying to save on alcohol. This was disappointing as the price tag would have justified a better job on a very commonly made cocktail. In any case, that aside I looked forward to the meal. The entree came, calamari. This was a cold mess. You would have expected it would have been warm at least. Tasteless, and uninspiring. Any Chinese takeaway shop in the area would have done a much better job. At this point I'm thinking that perhaps this restaurant's forte is not cocktails and entrees, but meat. Now the two very expensive meat dishes came along... Cold, bland, one of them too chewy. On top of it all, the sauce they brought was hardly enough for 2 people, although they came around with more sauces as if to give us reprieve and an opportunity to hide the otherwise unsalted taste of the meat. I mean, this was it, at some point, we had a go a trying to discern the difference in taste without masking with a sauce. Believe me, there was no discernible taste to speak of. A BBQ at home would have tasted much better. Before you say I don't know anything about fine dining and dine meats, I can say that I've been fine dining for 2 decades and have been to the best meat restaurants here and overseas. Rockpool did not cut it meat wise on the night. Next came the best offering (cost wise) for wine. Nothing less than $50 for a glass of wine. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining about paying for a fine glass of wine. However, the same Yalumba of the same year I had , you can get the bottle at Liquorland for $20. My observation is about offering a cheap wine as an expensive wine, but I knew it was. In other words, you are paying through the nose not exclusively for a quality wine but because you are having it at Rockpool. Next came the dessert. Beautiful creme brulee, perfectly made, the saviour of the night food wise. Worthy of a top restaurant. Regarding the service, the main waiter (perhaps of Malay descent) at our table was perfect, knowledgeable, friendly and genuine. I cannot fault him, he is an asset to the restaurant. The ambience at this restaurant is amazing, beautiful location as well. At the end of the night out party had interesting comment about fine dining and current cultural state of affairs. Gone is the guaranteed quality meal in the past assured but being able to afford fine dining. What you get now is a multitude of people, even young people that would have been just out of high school, being able to afford a restaurant like this. What that perhaps does, is lowers the quality of the food, cheaper chefs perhaps, because the new clientele wouldn't know the difference anyway, so you sell the experience of dining at a place like this, without the full...

Very disappointed with the experience we had at Rockpool Melbourne. Took an inordinate amount of time to get the waiters attention to order our drinks and food, it almost felt that we had been forgotten about. Once we did have their attention the staff were friendly and the somilier was very knowledgeable and was able to help us to choose a great pinot noir from California. However, this is where the night went down hill. We ordered a number of items from the menu some as per suggestions from the wait staff and some on our own volition.

Presentation of the food was good. We started with bone marrow on toast a tasty dish, which was presented well. We also had the fried Moreton Bay bugs which were over cooked and chewy.

We shared a scotch fillet steak which along with the wine was the highlight of the evening, the rest of the dishes that came out of the kitchen were less than diserable, some not being edible.

We ordered the 1.3kg lobster a pricey dish, and as such you would expect it to be amazing. Both my partner and I found it to be raw in some parts and we actually had to send it back to the kitchen as it was so undercooked.

The staff and chefs admitted it was under cooked however when it came back it appeared that they had put it under the heat for a minute with actually no particular care given to the food, it came back still under cooked. The roast potatoes with garlic and rosemary were hard like little bricks, very over cooked and dry. The greens as a side smelt and tasted like they had been blow torched with butane and were not even edible in the slightest. (I even asked the waiters to smell the greens) as it was so foul.

While we showed the staff and explained how terrible the lobster and side dishes were the best we were offered was that we would not be charged for the sides, even noting we left almost all of the lobster as we were terrified we would start our holiday with a bout of gastro.

On top of this we had to keep asking staff for our wine to be refilled multiple times as they took the bottle away from the table, and even when asked to just leave it on the table insisted on taking it away.

We do note that wait staff were embarrassed at the level of the food and did offer us a free dessert, however after the state of most of the food that came to our table we opted for a whiskey, which we paid for instead. (In the hope it would kill any potential outbreak from uncooked lobster).

Very low, quality, for a meal costing around $1k, we will definitely not be recommending the Melbourne Rockpool restaurant to any friends travelling...