Railway Hotel Gosford Bar & Steakhouse — Restaurant in New South Wales

(4.5 stars) Gosford can elicit a bit of cultural cringe from Coasties who would rather be identified with prettier parts of the Central Coast. Australian business legend, John Singleton, is set to change all that with The Bon Pavilion. You’ll find his new restaurant on the main street of Gosford at the base of his new 14-storey, luxury development, Bonython Tower.

Singleton has installed executive chef Sean Connolly at Bon Pavilion. I’ve been a fan of Connolly’s cooking for more than a decade. Connolly creates deceptively simple cuisine that wins on flavour. His other strength is in his people – having a finger in so many spaces, Connolly smartly assembles dependable people who can ensure each space stays consistent with his vision. At Bon Pavilion, that’s Liam Mundt, a Connolly-veteran who has relocated his life to the Central Coast.

Mundt takes me through the expansive open venue, kicking off with their day-time café with its eye-catching mural. Commissioned by Singleton, the impressive wall-length mural by Adelaide mural-icon Lisa King, summons the three Fs: food, local fauna & the feminine form. It’s a lovely backdrop for a relaxed space where you can enjoy a decent coffee on a padded tan banquette if you happen to miss your train.

Walking past the room’s centrepiece – a magnificent, weight-bearing sweeping staircase – you’ll find a well-stocked sports bar, complete with screens so you can keep track of the action. If a red wine enjoyed in a comfy fireside nook is more your speed, Bon Pavilion has also got you covered. They can even supply you with a takeaway bottle for later via the Bon Vin wine room.

In the open kitchen I can see Tony Gibson, who worked with Connolly at Astral, drilling the team so every Prawn Cocktail ($26), made on toothsome Yamba prawns & crisp iceberg lettuce, comes out adorned with the correct amount of ‘tomato blush mayo.’ or whatever posh thing they’re calling Marie Rose sauce these days. A few glistening pearls of roe & it’s complete, & you’ll feel as fancy as your Mum did when she ate one in 1983. Well-handled classics never get old - particularly when you have NV Pol Roger Brut Reserve ($155/bottle) on hand to go with them.

Connolly is not reinventing the wheel with this menu, but he is demonstrating to the Central Coast just how good updated classics can be. His pretty Kingfish Ceviche ($23) is partially ‘cooked’ with lime juice. Yamba prawns also make an appearance in the Chicken & Prawn Pie ($28). Golden, buttery pastry retains its crisp bite while literally exploding with leek cream sauce when you cut into it. Tender, juicy chook, mushy peas and meaty whole prawns tucked around the pie’s base, make eating this pie a thoroughly enjoyable exercise - one that I’d like to repeat again in the future.

If there’s a better steak on the Central Coast than Connolly’s 250g Grasslands Eye Fillet ($50) I certainly haven’t eaten it. The flavour is perfect; the seasoning – down to textural salt flakes resting on the top - is perfect; the resting is perfect - it’s a bloody enjoyable piece of grass-fed meat, served with a miso-Hollandaise that's another strong suit. Mundt matches our steak to the 2015 De Iuliis Touriga Nacionale ($10/glass) from the neighbouring Hunter Valley. This red wine has got a lovely nose, & a silky-smooth palate with no grippy tannins.

Mains aren't huge, so you probably will want a side or two. Don’t be afraid of Grilled Fioretto ($12) - it’s a silly brand name for cauliflower that looks like broccolini (but is actually a cauliflower flower). Here it's well-teamed with a surprisingly tangy egg yolk jam & a crunchy dusting of breadcrumbs. Duck Fat Potatoes ($12) are good, but not Simon Sandall good, so I’ve at least identified somewhere that Connolly can lift his game.

The Aussie bushfire colour palate of Bon Pavilion extends to crisp, brown dried plant décor lining the entranceway. Bushfires, at least in indigenous fire management terms, are about regrowth & renewal. This is a good motif for what The Bon Pavilion is hoping to achieve...

It is a huge and flexible architectural open space, where people can come in and meet, have a coffee and cake, light lunch, alcoholic drink in the sports bar or a sophisticated meal in the upmarket restaurant. There’s also a private dining-room cellar, Bon Vin. It is certainly a versatile space. The space is stunning. The Bon Pavilion really is the complete package, somewhere for locals and visitors alike to embrace.The food is prepared with ethically sourced premium ingredients delivered with precision and superb culinary technique. The menu has an emphasis on proteins cooked on the bone for enhanced flavour. We dined for lunch from the Bon Fire Grill, which has the feel of an upmarket steakhouse that would not be out of place in any cosmopolitan city. The seafood options on the menu were all of a high standard, this is understandable considering the proximity to the Brisbane water estuaries and access to fresh seafood from the coast. Beginning with some fresh oysters, served with a nice cab sav mignonette was a great way to start. We ate these with some house baked bread, which came with some creamy vegemite butter (I wish I could bottle this stuff and have it every day). The king fish ceviche (g) was beautifully planted, a very delicate and pretty dish, nicely cured with lime an added kick from fresh jalepenos and garnished with baby coriander. The grilled king prawns, one of our favourites, cooked in garlic and a pernod butter (gf) is an absolutely quintessential Australian dish that saw the flavour of the prawns highlighted through the method of cooking on the grill.The grilled Petuna Ocean Trout (gf) also highlights our fresh Australian produce, served with avocado and cucumber, the dish also utilised Japanese flavours with pickled ginger and a seaweed salad with a miso dressing. The fish was perfectly cooked, a nice coral colour, the flesh flakey and the skin crisp. By far, this was our pick of the day. If you’re not seafood lovers like us, don’t be alarmed, there is plenty of choice including a range of Australian proteins to choose from. The Lamb Barnsley chop is a classic, a tasty cut of meat prepared on the bone, which as it is naturally a fatty cut of meat, this intensifies the flavour. This was served with wilted greens, fresh mint sauce as well as a choice of red wine gravy, miso hollandaise or garlic and pernod butter, because let’s face it, you can never have too much sauce to choose from.Somehow managing to spare some room for dessert. The Bon Pavilion does offer a New York cheesecake, Pavlova on more. We were keen to touch on a sense of nostalgia through one of their affectionately known desserts, an ice cream called the ‘dropped softie’. The dessert is extremely good value, generous portion of soft serve ice cream (which can come dairy-free), essentially dropped on a plate. This is a good thing, as you don’t have to deal with the melted ice cream dripping down your fingers and turning sticky. The softie we devoured was served with popcorn and smothered in salted caramel. This was so very moreish and impossible not to finish. Keep an eye out for their weekly dropped softie specials, all based on classic flavours including the wagon wheel, iced vovo, mint slice and monte carlo to name a few.The pavilion also features a more relaxed cafe, where you can pop in for a poke bowl, panini or a house made pastry, and a coffee. It is open early so you can come by before work or grab a coffee and muffin on the go. The coffee is by Josie Coffee, a family owned and operated business based in Newcastle. This place is really a one stop stop in Gosford.We were extremely impressed with everything about Bon Pavillion, so much so we were immediately thinking of excuses to return. This ambitious project has...

For such a hyped and talked about venue it is very underwhelming and over priced.

The venue itself is suffering an identity crisis, the owners could not decide if they wanted this location to be a Cafe, Fine Dinning or a Bar and so made it all at once. Unfortunately it is somewhat of each but is not able to deliver well on any of the three.

The dinning room (well open living space more than a room) suffers due to the Food Court style seating and tables that are spaced at 2 - 3 feet. The bar TV sets (70+ inch wide screens playing sport and racing) dominate the view from 50% of the dinning seats and kill the vibe of the luxurious decoration.

The food was okay, it tasted reasonable however was quite unremarkable. The descriptions on the menus are however a little over the top and pretentious. The portion sizing is quite small given that a main comes with nothing other than the main item. For example a pie is a small Filo Parcel rather than a pie, sized about 5 cm round and that is all that is on a plate. No Salad or sides, not even a garnish of parsley at all, sides can be purchased as an extra and served family style but are quite expensive. The Duck Fat potatoes were very nice though.

The restaurant given the small portion sizes and high end prices (Mains $27 - $62 and a vegetarian option at $18) offers very poor value for money.

The drinks served to females wearing full make up are served without straws making it hard to drink and also increasing the risk of dirty glasses quite substantially (I hate lipstick on glassware)

Our second round of drinks were served in dirty glasses (some form of syrup still all over the glass) and the bar ran out of fresh fruit so instead they used some uncleaned Pineapple leaves as garnish, they were bruised and still covered in the white powder common on pineapple leaves.

The desert menus were delivered but we never got to taste desert as the wait staff lost us and after 25 mins we gave up waiting to place the order and requested the bill instead. This can happen anywhere and is especially possible in a new venue such as this and was the least of the sins for the night. These issues may improve as the restaurant gets over its teething issues but they may get worse too.

For all the hype and press this venue has received I would recommend visiting other locations until the Bon Pavilion stops reading their own press. I'll give it another go in 6 to 12 months and see if they have come up to the level they think...