465 The Avenue — Restaurant in Sydney

This restaurant has a very nice and uncommon aesthetic. Seating was comfortable and the environment wasn't too loud. The food I got was Crispy Squid as the entree, medium rare Eye Fillet and the Sticky Fig Pudding for dessert. The food is what I will be giving the overall rating on.

Crispy Squid, by itself was fine, it lacked seasoning and flavour until adding the sauce. The chilli sauce was a game changer, added spice and a much nicer flavour to the dish. It was $18 and definitely not worth the price, while the sauce brought the meal up from 3 to 4 stars in quality, the quantity is what was lacking.

The Eye Fillet portion size was also bad, well much worse. The price of this item was $47, and it was basically just the small piece of meat and its side of substituted chips for $3 extra. It was cooked medium rare, chips were crisp and very well cooked. The meat, well it was underwhelming and very disappointing. I like to rate my food at restaurants by judging whether I can do better at home, and well... To replicate this, I could walk down to Coles, buy some meat, go home and chuck it on a pan, and voila! Eat the unseasoned, tasteless, and cheaper meat. Seriously, if you want to replicate this restaurant meat, just do that.

Again like the squid, the meat needed the side sauce to gain taste, meat shouldn't need sauce, it should be able to stand on it's own and be accompanied by a side sauce if the customer wishes to use add it to the meal. Like the squid, the meat lacked seasoning and flavour by itself. This meal hits a well-deserved 2 stars, going up by one for the sauce.

Lastly the dessert. Sticky Fig Pudding. This was nice, a warm dessert with a scoop of ice cream on the side and some toffee sauce. There definitely needed to be some more of the sauce on this one, because as you got further into the dessert it got a bit dry. But the flavour, portion and price was well worth the quality. Costing $12, this dish was a solid 4 star item.

So rounded up, that's 3 stars for the entree, 2 for the main, and 4 for the dessert. Landing this review at 3 stars in total. Would I come back? Yes. But I definitely would not get the entree or main again. Give this restaurant a go, but don't get...

I have eaten in The Avenue many times, both at lunch and at dinner. I booked a table for five around two months in advance, to have a nice dinner with family that I hadn't seen for a while.

The first thing to go wrong was that we were forced to sit in the outside section of the restaurant (still enclosed) because a private function had booked out the interior section. Not a deal-breaker at this stage. We order our food and then the trivia night starts, complete with obnoxious American with a microphone and loudspeaker. This went on for around two hours. No conversation was possible without shouting.

Oh, and out of the five food orders, three were delivered successfully. Two were randomly handed to another table by a waiter who had just started working at the restaurant, according to another server. So my father and I sat at the table for twenty minutes watching the others eat before we finally got our dinner.

The food was as expected. Very nice. Five stars.

Apart from a few 'so sorry' from our waitress we were not offered any explanation or formal apology for this appalling service. Management who took the booking, if the private function had already been booked at that point, should have made us aware of the trivia night and we would have gone elsewhere. If we booked first and ended up being shunted outside to deal with continuous loud noise then I have no words.

Regardless of the food quality, which is wonderful, I cannot recommend this restaurant unless you don't care about potentially not having a conversation. And for the price you are paying, being able to carry on a conversation should be the bare...

The overall experience at 465 The Avenue was very good. It's tucked away not far from the station. The venue is surprisingly large and very well decorated, which gives the space a great vibe.

Our party of 5 arrived early because I read in other reviews that they make good cocktails. We wanted to enjoy a few drinks before dinner, which we did. Often I find that venues like to rush you through the drinks and dinner service to get you out the door quickly which was NOT our experience here. We were never rushed or pressured and the service was very good.

The menu is a bit of a mix, which I like, but the food was a bit hit-and-miss. For starters we ordered the charcuterie, edamame and haloumi which were all faultless. For mains we ordered fish and chips, noodle bowl with bbq prawns, eye fillet steak and chicken katsu. I'd highly recommend the katsu and the beef fillet. But I would probably order a side of fries next time.

If you're looking for a reasonably intimate place to catch up on gossip with friends you haven't seen in years over a few great cocktails AND if you're looking for something a little bit different in Chatswood, then I'd say this is the...