Garfish Manly — Restaurant in Sydney

Super disappointed after being very excited to go. My husband and I booked NYE dinner here 2021, Booking was for Live music and 3 course set menu.. We arrived... the place was very quiet but relatively full of people, and when I say quiet I mean you can hear a pin drop. the singers were on a break which is fine but the mood on entry in the place was incredibly boring and dull, It seemed like we heard the singers maybe half an hour out of our of the 2 hour seating. we were seated behind a large pole (okie dealt with it). The starter bread was not nice at all, the entree of ravioli was not nice, the mains (fish was ok) the ribs though, the waiter told us they were slowed cooked for hours... absolute rubbish, the amount of FAT on it was such poor quality. We left the chewed up fat on the plate. For $180 per person, we left hungry in fact starving. We did raise this with management on the night. He offered a $14 glass of wine complimentary. I sent an email while I was there, no response. Look, the staff were lovely, the worst $360 we have ever spent. I feel like in this review I can't even express ow awful the experience was for the over priced outing we got charged. Do yourself a favour save your money and don't waste the experience, One of my favourites on the northern beaches is Barrenjoey boat house at palm beach! or the skiff club in manly Similar pricing but worth every cent. unlike Garfish Manly. $360 in the toilet. Really garfish should be returning our money, I haven't asked for it back I left that up to them to decide. but I as a business owner no way would I let my clients experience this nor would I have the hide to charge the money. I repeat they have not even responded to my email, which id be more then happy for you to screen shot and ad to this response to show how I have approached the situation. But each to there own. Im here just sharing a poor experience. which clearly they couldn't' care less.

UPDATE to your reply (9.1.22) I appreciate your reply Danen, however I haven't complained about staff shortage. the food was awful so in your response to me, it sounds like your using COVID as an excuse for poor quality food, are you telling me that $360 isn't enough to cover quality food? Correct me if I'm wrong? The place was full it wasn't empty. Any way I will continue to check me emails. we're at day 9. Garfish Manly were pretty quick to reply to my emails for the booking. And we couldn't move seats as we were advised they were fully booked. So on assumption they've seen my email and chosen...

Food: We got the chicken liver parfait, fish and chips, and prawn and clam linguine to share among a group of 3. The only standout of the meal were the parfait and the side salad. The fish was dry and smelled slightly off, and half the chips were overdone and dark brown. The linguine was fine, quite bland and tasted like cold cream.

Service: The worst part of this lunch was the service itself and the stark difference between the service received by tables around us and our table. Out of all restaurants in Sydney we have yet to experience such appalling service from a decent upmarket restaurant.

To start, the lady with dark hair, fringe, and glasses took one look at us and promptly ignored us for the rest of the meal. It took waving at the server’s station to get their attention for them to take our order almost 20 minutes into being seated. The same lady then almost elbowed my aunt in her face when placing down extra cutlery, and promptly walked away without acknowledging the near miss. Not once throughout the meal we were checked on except to refill our water once, which the same lady with the glasses skipped over my mum’s mostly empty glass for some reason.

This was supposed to be a test run for a birthday lunch later in the month, but after this experience I will actively discourage anyone from coming to this branch and the Crow’s Nest branch. Not sure if it’s worthy of a mention but we were the only Asians seated. I’d love to give the staff the benefit of the doubt but the tables around us received vastly different service than we did and we were thoroughly...

Went here 2 times and both times were disappointing.

First time was last week with my partner and his family to celebrate his birthday. The food was okay, but the cons overpowered. Sat 6 of us on a tiny table, we could barely fit, and we booked well in advance. Service was terrible, first 10-20 mins when we were deciding on food, we felt rushed as the server told us we needed to order fast. Then the server proceeded to disappear for what felt like an hour and didn’t take our order. The rest of the night she was impossible to find and no other servers were around. We felt as though they had forgotten about us.

I was really disappointed and decided that maybe this was a one time thing and to try again (we had already booked for Valentine’s Day the following week).

Fast forward to V day, food again was average and not worth the cost. Again the service was TERRIBLE! We again felt ignored and forgotten which was really disappointing.

Lastly, we received an email from them a week before Vday to advise us the live music was cancelled due to musicians being sick and that we would get either complimentary champagne or $10 Credit. Which did not happen. I would have told our server to put the $10 credit towards the meal, but we waited SO LONG for her to bring the machine to pay for the dinner it wasn’t even worth it.

Long review, but my advice: save your money and go...