Marina Balaena restaurant — Restaurant in Queensland

Dined here Sat 20.8.22 for 2 person 6.30pm reservation. I will acknowledge it was a busy Saturday night as well as covid has hugely impacted the hospitality industry in terms of staff availability and experience. My two star rating is based on the sub standard customer service experienced on our visit. Past reviews also mention excessive wait times and it sort of appears to be a random flip of the coin if you get 1 or 5 star treatment. Ours started badly when our table was not ready on our arrival and we were politely invited to wait at the bar. I can accept this as it is common occurrence in hospitality. Expecting to be notified when it was ready, at 6.50pm I enquired with the same young waitress to be told "it's been ready for ages"who then pointed to our table at the far side of the venue. Not escorted to our table which was bare of side plate, cutlery, napkins, drink or food menu, glasses or water. Just an empty table. Sat there waiting to be approached by staff. At 7.15pm we were approached by Dean (owner/manager) to take our drink and food order. I requested cutlery water etc and recieved first of many apologies from Dean. Also informed that oysters had run out and other key ingredients of some dishes not available. Had to seek the drinks menu. Had to amend our desired entrees after being informed of lack of availability. Dean is the sole person taking all drinks and food order from 120+ diners using IPAD instantaneous bar/kitchen notification and having to continually circulate throughout the venue repeatidly approaching each table. Unfortunately this model is not efficient nor timely and is single person dependant. 2 young waiters delivering ordered drinks and two young waiters delivering the dishes to diners. At 7.45pm we queried where our entrees were. Apology offered on delay by Dean. 8pm entrees arrived. 8.20pm mains delivered. Both side dishes for mains not delivered (1×vegetable 1xsalad). Informed waiter delivering mains of missing sides. He assured us he would rectify but either forgot or ignored us and continued with his duties (I later raised that sides were not delivered and had cost deducted without objection). To wait 1hr 50 minutes from time of our booking to being served mains is unacceptable. Dean needs to improve his business model to either trust his staff to take drink/food orders and/or improve the speed at which his kitchen operates to produce/deliver food or reduce number of diners at busy times so that excessive wait times do not occur. It was a common theme of frustration and discontent of neighbouring diners of the wait times to be approached by staff, have your order taken by Dean and wait time for arrival of food. Dean appears to be a professional apologist to cover for the many inadequacies of his operating model yet he need not be if he trusted his staff to take drink and food orders rather than just he. With this poor customer service and excessive wait times, in my humble opinion, this venue would not survive in a larger regional or metro setting in a more competitive environment. Objectively the food is top notch and I have no issue with the quality, taste, amount and presentation of the dishes we had; and observed on other tables. However; poor customer service and excessive wait times significantly detracts from the dining experience at this venue hence my 2/5 rating for my visit. Would I recommend this venue to others??....YES I would, but on the proviso not to attend at busy times as Dean's operating model cannot accommodate the number of customers without generating excessive wait times. Seek to improve Dean. Enough previous dining reviews have also commented on the same excessive wait timebut still...

To be clear from the start, we have been to this venue at least half a dozen times before and generally have enjoyed all aspects of the Cafe and staff on each occasion. Tonight was very different. Celebrating my wife's birthday, we decided on Cafe Balaena for dinner. We arrived and the venue was busy, we approached the bar to order some pre dinner drinks only to hear a young female suggesting to another staff member that she couldn't make a certain drink as she's never done that before. Prior to ordering the drinks we were taken to our table and told we could order drinks and they would be delivered to the table. These drinks took 25 mins to arrive. We then immediately ordered a shared entrée and our mains. The entrée arrived but was incorrect. When the young waitress and the manager returned with the same dish, it was explained that we had ordered this dish and the one we had actually ordered so to avoid any confrontation we excepted it and decided to eat both. From this point the service with drinks was on point and then our mains arrived. My main was correct but the other 2 were incorrect. Once again the manager attended our table to explain. The reasoning behind the mistake was the screen on the tablet he uses to take the orders is often dirty and when he tries to push certain buttons it often chooses the wrong meals. He offered to take all three meals back and have the correct ones delivered all at the same time. We decided to leave the correct meal and I ate that and it was beautiful. The other 2 meals were served extremely fast (approximately 3-4 minutes) which was surprising considering one was a steak cooked medium and the other was a chicken dish. Both of these meals were served just warm and bordering on cold with the steak being almost served blue and with forgotten sides - it was literally a steak with a topper. By this stage we had become very disheartened and decided to leave. I approached the manager and was expecting to be asked how our meals were or even the overall experience but was immediately told that he believes I received a free beer. The bill came to just under $150.00 and when I paid I got a strong feeling he was waiting on a tip. Let's just say that didn't happen! Giving a 2 star review is not what I'd normally do. In fact I would just normally not return to the venue but considering our past experiences have always been positive and the staff were trying their best I would hope that maybe management might try to rectify these issues and everyone...

I had good friends coming from Victoria for his 60th birthday and wanted to give them the Cafe Balaena experience. We have eaten at this restaurant many times. I rang and spoke to Dean (Owner) and asked if he would do the special "Happy Birthday" song. I wanted it to be on Sunday but he couldn't guarantee that he would be in on the day , so I agreed to make it dinner for the Monday night at 6pm for 6 pax sitting in the window seats. We arrived at 5 to 6 to be told that they had a booking for 8 pax and had given our table to them and as we were early our alternative table was not ready and we were asked to stand to the side and wait. Dean then said as compensation he would place us in the window seats??? I had already made that request on the phone a week prior. We were seated and no one came to take our drinks order until 6.40pm. this is 40 minutes after our booking time which we were on time for. I asked the waitress if we could order our meals as well. Dean came to take our food order and it was very clear he was annoyed with us although we were unsure why, assumed it was because we had asked to order . When one of asked if the meal came with vegetables or if they were an extra he answered "Of Course you need to purchase extra". our drinks came at 6:50 and our meals about 7:30. One meal was not what we had ordered and when we queried it with the older wait staff I was challenged that is was what we had asked for. I politely asked to see the menu and pointed out which steak it should have been. She flounced off only to return within minutes with a new steak meal that could not have possibly been cooked in that time. It had clearly had the first topping scraped off and the correct topping applied, of course the meal was cold by that time. Dean spilt a drink over one of us soaking his clothes, a waitress dropped a knife on another of us. Very little was offered in the way of apology. In all the meals were very good and beautifully cooked with the exception of the cold steak, but the service at this restaurant was appalling to say the least. The younger staff are friendly but lack any training on how to wait tables. Expectations of excellent service are never fully met and on this occasion were not met at all. I think it is unacceptable to have your table given away 5 minutes before your booking time, and then to have to wait 50 minutes to get your first drink is a huge let down. Cafe Balaena DO BETTER you have...