Austral Hotel — Restaurant in Queensland

I went and had a sit down meal at the Austral Hotel tonight, I'll preface this review with a couple of facts from the night. Firstly they had 2 large groups in and they were down by 1 staff member.

The first guy who served me was a young lad with glasses, very green, not very proactive definitely needs some training. I asked for a table just for myself, two small tables were free and trying to get a response out of him was very difficult.

When I did get my drink, I was handed over to a lady with braided her, who was lovely, very accommodating and helpful, she really got the points up for this place.

I ordered my meal - starter of salt and pepper calamari and a main. porterhouse steak (rare), chips, a caesar salad and a steak topper of onion rings, with peppercorn sauce.

The starter came our pretty quick (within 10mins), decent size portion, but relatively flavourless.....just a good size cheap starter. Asked for cutlery, didn't get any, after 5mins of waiting, had to go and ask the staff behind the bar for some.

The main came out around 5mins after the starter, which was a bit too quick, I was barely half way through.

The steak was medium and more toward the middle of the steak, well done, chip portion was quite small, salad had heaps of dressing and the $4 onion ring topper, consisted of 4 onion rings.

The meal all up was $60.00, for that type of money it was a fairly average meal, not terrible, but nothing fantastic, just an...

Would genuinely be 5 stars if it wasn't for the 15-20% surcharge on food that is already overpriced to begin with.

15-20 is an estimate because they didn't specify, they just slapped an extra $5 on the price to milk more money out of people. AHL are behaving quite grubby in this regard.

Edit: not 10% and was the only one charging this. Both places I visited for food that night maintained their standard prices free of any surcharge.

This was not printed as claimed nor was it specified before my money was handed over. Luckily my money was returned so I could still spend it on food that was prepared by other local, independently operated venues as opposed to AHL's more profitable business consisting of multiple venues that make more than enough already to pay holiday rates without extorting their customers, in this case, as the management was well aware of, were predominantly people coming from the show after it closed its gates.

The surcharge is certainly not necessary to keep the doors open with the amount of money the venue already generates from it's 10am to 5am gaming rooms and hard working staff. Again, a sinister surcharge that is impossible to justify given the disgusting amount of money AHL venues generate compared to smaller,...

My family and I went for the first time for dinner tonight, ordering and receiving food was fast and easy. However, the food was overall very disappointing, my Aunt had ordered the roast pork which when delivered was the wrong order. After getting the correct order she found that the pork was dry and also quite old. After talking to the restaurant about it they politely apologised and offered for her dessert to be complimentary. I had ordered the calamari starter and it was very delicious so was my chicken schnitzel so I pleased. I had also ordered the deep fried ice-cream and it was delivered quickly and was presented amazingly. However, the papadun that the deep-fried icecream was on was extremely stale. I had high hopes for the deep-fried icecream itself but after the first bite it was very unpleasant, the crust on the outside was really stale and was heavily seasoned with cinnamon despite cinnamon never being mentioned in the ingredients. All my family tried and agreed with my opinion. Afterwards we all cancelled our orders and the restaurant kindly refunded...