The Whistler — Restaurant in Newcastle-Maitland

DO NOT RECOMMEND!!!!

We made a last minute booking for The Whistler on a Saturday night. From the moment we got there, nothing went right.

These are some of the issues we had: No one welcomed us or told us where our table was. Staff passed our confused faces with no care. You had to line up to order drinks and food. That itself is ok, except when you wait at least 15min in line. Never went back for a second drink due to the wait. Staff member (the manager of the night) could not give me a recommendation on wine "I don't know anything about wine". After waiting 30min for our food, we asked the waitress how long will it be for our starters? Her response was "its busy" and shrugged us off. 15min later (now waiting 45min) we asked the same waitress if she could find out how long our starters will be, she never came back with a response. After an hour of waiting for food our mains arrived, still hadn't received our starters and the steaks were cold. At this stage we got up and spoke to the manager, asked for a refund (he refunded the meals) and we shared our frustrations with everything. The manager accused us of making his 2 waitresses cry (we always spoke politely and direct to them), and stated that they were understaffed and busy.

The manager was too frazzled and busy to discuss our issues, so I emailed the owner of The Whistler with our grievances. That was nearly 2 weeks ago and I never received a response back.

I understand mistakes can happen (e.g. taking more bookings than what the staff levels can handle), but when the business can't admit to it or empathise with us, they don't deserve...

Very disappointed. The hash browns sounded awesome . In fact it was the reason I ordered the whistler big breakfast.

Waited an hour for our food. Which wasn’t a problem because the atmosphere was good. When the food finally arrived the first item I wanted to attack was the home made hash browns. Started digging through the food on my plate looking for the hash browns.

The waitress saw me looking for the hash brown and came over and said at this point that if I was looking for hash browns, they had ran out.

If I had known when I ordered I would not have ordered this and gone for the other item I had been looking at on the menu

I understand that restaurants run out of stuff occasionally, and this is not my gripe. But don’t say you are going to provide something and when you can’t do that…. Do absolutely nothing about it until the food arrives and then still do absolute nothing about it.

No substitute was ever offered, no opportunity to change my order, no partial refund due to the missing item and not even an apology (The wait we were given an apology for and the wait was never a problem).

The attitude seemed to be. “Put anything on the plate to reduce the wait- don’t worry about it matching the menu “ .

The beans were horrible and flavourless. The rest was unseasoned and average at best. The eggs were cooked well.

Give this place a miss. They...

Nice older style building with a modern twist.

When you visit here you use a QR code on your table to order but there is no reception in the restaurant so you need to use their WiFi and code. None of this was explained to us on arrival and we walked around trying to get reception to place our order and staff did not say anything to us. In the end we had to ask if we could just order from the staff and then they explained the process.

Half of our order arrived one entree and main together even though we specified entrees separate to mains when ordering. We then waited another 30 minutes for the other main to be served. Both times our food was served without cutlery and we had to get up and ask staff for some.

The food was sub par for the price. I had the pork belly entree and it was served with soggy crackle and fat to meat ratio was not good. If there is anything I recommend it would be the pizza. I had the potato pizza which was nice although I did have to dab the excess oil off because it was making the pizza soggy.

After all this I would only recommend this place for takeaway pizza and not a dine in experience.

While some staff were nice I think this restaurant would benefit from some staff training to improve the...