Ascua — Restaurant in Perth

We booked this restaurant for New Year’s Eve dinner, while also being guests at the hotel. There was a set menu (see picture) at the cost of $165 not including drinks. To start off, our reservation was at 20:30. The table was not ready and the party had not received their dessert yet. In the meantime we wait at the hotel bar, as the hostess in the restaurant did not offer us a drink or seat while we wait.

We are seated 50 MINUTES after our booking. Immediately they ask if we would like alcoholic or non alcoholic welcome drink and it takes them about 20 minutes to bring it and a further 20 minutes to bring the non alcoholic one. We are then given the bread and when we finish this the guest relations manager and hostess show up at our table. They say they are sorry to inform is that they have run out of the wagyu (the main course). How can you run out of the main course on New Year’s Eve at a restaurant with a set menu? They know how many bookings they have and therefore how many to order. How they can mess this up is beyond me. Their solution for this is to offer prawns (because that’s the same grade beef as wagyu…not) and drinks on the house. We don’t accept this and discuss back and forth and they leave to discuss further.

Around 10pm a waitress comes and asks if we would like to order drinks which we do and tell her we will order something else for the main course. She tells us this is not possible because IT IS NOW THE LAST CALL. At this point we haven’t even had the amuse bouche yet. And it is New Year’s Eve for crying out loud!

We get the amuse bouche at 10:30pm, but surprise surprise they only have 2 left, so half the table are given salmon instead. They don’t tell us anything though they just serve it and hope we don’t notice or say anything.

We debate leaving several times because at this point we haven’t gotten anything that was on the original menu and we can’t order any drinks. But we stick it out and go find the guest relations manager again to ask for a refund as the meal we are getting is clearly not worth the $165 which we have prepaid. He agrees to a full refund and offers a bottle of the cheapest house wine. We have still not received the wine we ordered from the waitress so we ask if we can go get it, because this guy clearly does not have experience in the restaurant business and is struggling to help us. I get the bottle myself from the wine fridge and bring it to the table to pour.

An hour after the amuse bouche, 11:20pm we are served our main course. That’s right no starter/entre, the main. They have skipped the entre (without telling us) and just serve us the main instead. We don’t say anything because at this point it is comical and we have half an hour to New Year’s Eve fireworks which we had planned to see. The chef was able to find beef cheeks which they offer us instead of prawns, however a waitress brings out some other steaks as well as a compensation.

At 11:45 pm we are served the dessert and to no one’s surprise, it was not what was on the menu. Clearly they had also ran out of the dessert. So we were given a sharing platter of different things they had found at the back of the fridge and ONE of the creme brûlée which was on the menu.

I don’t know what went wrong this night, if they had allowed walk ins earlier on and served them the wagyu that was ordered for all the people that had prebooked? Or if they simply can’t do math. On top of that there were only 2 waitresses working which in a restaurant with around 20 tables is totally unacceptable. They had no time to get around to all the tables with drinks and also kept disappearing to gods knows where. On top of this we are really disappointed in the way the managers chose to handle this and that it had to come to us continually complaining for them to offer any compensation. This is not the service expected at a 5 star hotel.

It is really a shame that the service and communication was SO BAD because the food was actually really good. But no meal is worth...

I was excited to go for dinner here with our group. But I have been warned to steer clear of the sirloin. The food we chose was exceptional, the Service more than disappointing. We started early and we ordered entrees which arrived as expected, we enjoyed that and we drank more wine. One of our guests had to call the waiter Over and suggest to them that they really need to take our order for Main course now because even if the kitchen was able to pre-empt what we were going to order and had our beef standing it was still going to take quite some time. Sure enough one hour and 15 minutes later our Main course arrived. We were enjoying this when our waiter came over again to tell us the kitchen will be closing and to ask what desserts we would like to order. As you can imagine, no one ordered a desert whilst they were 1/3 of the way through Main course. Despite arriving early, we were the last to leave. Some of our meals were $280 each which seemed trivial compared to what we spent on wine. Upon leaving, we discovered a point of sale system desperately needs to be replaced, we split our bill and this proved to be technically challenging and thoroughly time-consuming with a dozen of us waiting around more than half an hour for this to be done one by one. We were glad that our waiter persisted with the system that felt like it belonged to Noah’s Ark. It’s a beautiful restaurant. The chef is obviously highly skilled but the rest of it is just not at the standard one would expect at an international grade hotel.

For one person in our group, this was the third visit, despite quite some time between the other visits on previous occasions similar issues were experienced. Three of the significant issues throughout the night were thoroughly predicted and expected. This makes me feel that there is no intention to work towards rectifying them or improving. It is a shame really because that chef is good. -1 star for point of sale -2 stars for repeated disorganisation with the Service -1 star the lack of coordination between waiter and kitchen +1 star for the waiter who did his absolute best he possibly could with what he had...

This is a new Spanish restaurant in the CBD. It's located in the Intercontinental Hotel. My friend suggested us to head there for a catchup. We arrived a bit earlier they open at 6 pm. The staffs are very friendly seated us in one of the booths. The seats were comfortable. But unfortunately for the shorter person, we felt the chair and table is a tad too far. The service of the restaurant is very good. The staffs were very attentive. We ordered the Seared Scallops, green pea puree, almond and tomato salsa, dried Serrano ham. I find that the green pea puree is a bit overpowering. The scallops are fresh, juicy and flavoursome. Char-grilled Octopus, smoked potato, piquillo peppers, baby capers, squid ink aioli - The highlight of this dish is the smoked potato and the squid ink aioli, it was very smooth and buttery. It complements the octopus. Seared Spanish Mackerel, squid ink paella, green beans and black mussels. Initially, when the dish arrived, it didn't look big at all. I was disappointed. When I started eating the dish itself is very filling and I am happy with the size. The mackerel was bit overcooked for what I think. The paella, green beans and black mussels were very complementary to the taste of the whole dish. Beef Rump Cap, grilled mushrooms, wood-fired baby peppers (280g) The beef rump cap was just cooked perfectly. I can say this is the best steak I've tried for the longest time. It's better than the $125 Rockpool 9+ Marble 200g rib-eye steak. We ordered the sides which are hand cut fries, with spicy aioli and also the char-grilled calcots, romesco sauce. As for dessert, we shared the crème Catalan with poached rhubarb and cinnamon churros. I think this dessert is big for this serving, the creme Catalan is very rich. Spiced Poached Pear, vanilla rice pudding with raisin and muscatel ice cream was good. The rice pudding was light. I will return to this restaurant to try the set menu which includes the Tomahawk steak. This restaurant gives Perth a refreshing taste of...