Firepop — Restaurant in Sydney

I WILL DEFINITELY NOT COME BACK OR RECOMMEND any of my friends to try Firepop!!! There was so many issues when I visited for my birthday celebration. Just to point out a few, one the wrong menu was given to us in the beginning. They initially gave us the 'old' set menu. So when our first dish came out we were all confused with it. Wondering what it was or did they just give the dish in a differently arranged order that we didn't know. So we had asked one of the staff and he told us it was a 'Wagyu Toast' and that he would check with the kitchen that he had the name of the dish correctly... then 5 minutes the original staff who gave us the dining menu, apologised and said he gave us the old menu earlier. So the 'Wagyu Toast was on their 'new' menu. That's was fine we all make human errors everyday. The next main issue was their fish dish, which you can see in the photo there was not 1 or 2 fish bones but MULTIPLE fish bones, we were so lucky the bones were so noticable and big enough to see them before putting that fish into our mouths. Otherwise something serious would have happened if any of us had choked into those bones. We had mentioned this issue to their manager, Alina, and her response was so unprofessional and simple - "that's just a human error"!!?? I mean really??! This is a one hat restaurant and we received this kind of response from them which was just unbelievable. The last main issue, was paying for the bill. Initially when the staff gave us the EFTPOS machine to pay, the total was $835 on the EFTPOS machine ($140pp for the set menu plus drinks and add ons) we tried paying with debit card NOT CREDIT card!! But there was issues with it for some reason who knows... so when we retried paying the second time, this time they charged us an extra 1.8% CREDIT CARD surcharge!!? Which shouldn't have been changed because we paid with debit card and didn't 'tap' instead we inserted the card so it could be processed under debit savings account. Again we raised the issue to Alina and she said the 1.8% surcharge was mentioned on the menu and said we should have seen it. Yes we did see it. But it only say 1.8% Surcharge for CREDIT CARDS not Mastercard or Debit Cards.... Overall we weren't happy with the entire food experience at Firepop. It was not a memorable experience at all. It was so disappointed hoping I would have a good time for...

Such a disappointing experience. Walked in and taken upstairs to table - the lighting so dark in the stairway you could easily stack it. Was seated and told about the menu items and drinks. Ordered immediately set menu for 4 people and wine and cocktails. I advised that I don’t eat seafood and was assured there was only one item in the set menu that had seafood and they would easily accommodate with a veg option specifically the corn rib. I thanked them and said that’s perfect. The courses started coming out and no drinks were served. By the 3rd course we were asking where our wine and cocktails were. When we finished 4th course Negronis finally arrived for 2 and soon after the waitress came with bottle of wine. Tried to pour wine and we had to tell her the cork was still in. She took it away and it wasn’t til even later that she came back with the wine so half way through the set menu did the wine get poured. The fish arrived for the table and once it was all done I asked whether my non seafood option would be coming. Waitress apologized and said she would investigate. Another waitress came (I think her manager) and very bluntly said she had spoken to the kitchen and there will be no substitute. I replied “so I just don’t get a course?” She replied in again super blunt rude way “no you won’t. If it was an allergy they would accommodate but you don’t have one so no” I was flabbergasted at this stage and said “there has been a calamity of issues since we sat down” she just walked away. Given the price and the way Firepop markets itself I expected much more in terms of service. Waitress also spilled beer on one one of the party. Before mains came the rude waitress ended up putting a vegetarian dish down saying the kitchen has made this for you - i appreciated it but i had such a foul taste by this stage.

The service picked up after this.

The food. It was ok. The wagyu is absolutely delicious - everything else was fine. Other people on the table said the fish was amazing. Panacotta dessert tasted nice but was so grainy. Definitely won’t be going back. Wish we had just gone next door where it’s delicious and the service is...

This was my first visit to Firepop and - unless someone paid me a great deal of $$$ or the future of the human race depended on it - probably my last. It's also the ONLY time in the last decade that I have left no tip.

We ordered the Classic menu - $80 each. It was astonishingly bad. The skewered meats were dry, over-cooked and under-seasoned, and everything was served at room temperature.

I found the vegetable dishes particularly unappetising. The wedge of iceberg lettuce topped with a green sauce looked so unappealing that I couldn't even bring myself to sample it. I had a tiny taste of the sauce and that was enough for me.

The chunks of boiled potato in yoghurt butter and dill were, again, underseasoned and tepid.

The swiss brown mushroom dish was just plain weird. It consisted of partially cooked, semi-raw chunks of room temperature mushroom in a puree of either celeriac or jerusalem artichoke. The puree was tasty, but the mushrooms were very underwhelming and, like all the vegetable dishes, we left most of it untouched.

The service was patchy at best. It took quite a while for our cocktails to arrive, and they came at the same time as our first courses, and we were well into our meal before we managed to coax someone into taking our wine order and delivering the bottle.

There seemed to be a more than adequate number of floor staff to service the room, so I'm not sure why the service was so sub par. None of the servers appeared to be scanning the room, instead they spent an inordinate amount of time and attention entering data into the POS screen. Because of this, wine glasses were left empty and plates and glasses weren't cleared promptly.

I don't expect, or want, to be fawned over, but I shouldn't have to fight to get the attention of a server. The inattentiveness of the servers made it a far from relaxing experience and this, along with the poor quality of the food, delivered one of the least pleasurable dining experiences of the last decade.

The total cost including Classic Menu, a negroni each and a bottle of Salomon Gruner Veltliner was...