Willowdale Hotel — Restaurant in Sydney

We welcome Willowdale hotel to the estate. It’s been long awaited and everyone’s been craving for this pub ever since the development application lodgement.

To be fair this review is all about the functionality of spaces and services of Willowdale and a future review will be on food.

First of all Willowdale hotel is a pub that serves licensed alcoholic drinks & meals and does not have any rooms for staying.

The venue provides ample parking covered and open areas. It has a few entries, but the main entrance is from Barbula Rd next to the VIP carpark. Once inside the interior feels spacious, with high ceiling, wooden & greenery finishes, bringing nature into the building. There are several dining areas such as multi function room that has operable sliding windows and operable roof, enclosed reserved seating area, kids play area with table for parents to eat, function room that can accommodate around 60 guests, VIP lounge pokey hi tech machines with touch screens, outdoor seating for smoking area, 3 bar areas, order counter and amenities.

As you would expect any newly opened place won’t have perfect service in the first few days, weeks or month. Give them some time and come again. What’s interesting is their facebook page says ‘limited bookings available for remainder of the week’, but if you rock up there’s still plenty of tables available in the non-reserved area. Also for a venue of this size, there’s no table online ordering service, you literally have to queue 20+ minutes until you reach the order counter. What would have been more efficient is to scan, order, pay and pick up the meals yourself.

Willowdale hotel looks promising and will attract a lot of locals within the estate as its now offers the residence another choice and destination for food & entertainment.

Review Part 2 - 2 June: After visiting Willowdale hotel in just over a week ago, a mate of mine mentioned that the chicken schnitzel was average, but today I revisited and lunch and another mate of mine said it was pretty good. So rule no.1 don’t judge until you’ve tried it yourself! What I did try myself was the Caesar salad with add-on grilled 100g beef and it was beyond my expectation. Sourdough cob loaf was a bit big as a starter in my opinion if you’ve sharing between two, but size is good for a table of 4.

Our first impression looking at the menu was there’s not a lot to choose from and every dish seemed expensive, but I can honestly say the portion and quality is totally worth it. This left a good impression and I’ll be back again to try more! While the service was surprisingly quick for the schnitzel to arrive at our table, the Caesar with grilled steak was a bit slower. Nevertheless, we enjoyed a great lunch & beer while watching a bit of the NBA grand finals.

Also, we were fortunate to come today, when the roof was opened to the sky, which made the dining experience to the next level.

Review Part 3 - 8 June: Arrived around 6:30pm, the pub was packed with a long queue waiting to for a table without a booking. All the staff seemed busy today, running around and very disorganised. There wasn’t a lot of people waiting to order surprisingly, but the service was absolutely horrendous.

We ordered one kids meal, a pizza and a Caesar salad with grilled beef. Kids meal came after 15 minutes, pretty big portion which includes a drink and ice-cream for $12. Our pizza 🍕 and Caesar salad 🥗 came after 50 minutes, after constantly following up with the staff about our order. My wife was getting impatient and furious as she saw other tables getting served while I tried to stay calm.

On the bright side she did enjoy the Caesar salad 🥗 with grilled beef 🥩. While the pizza 🍕 tasted average, the size was big enough to share for 2 people.

As others have mentioned, the cocktails on tap costs $18 per glass. But you need to try the bloody Shiraz spritz at least once because it’s bloody delicious!

Review 4: food and service so much better now. Don’t forget there’s QR ordering now because I still a lot of...

Willowdale Hotel is my local, and as a local I can say it has been a wonderful and long awaited addition for the local and wider community.

I’ve dined in at the WH on more occasions than I can count and haven’t had a meal that I wasn’t happy with. I often bring clients in to share a meal, while having meetings and am happy to continue doing so.

The steaks can arrive a little more well cooked than ordered, but nothing that can’t be managed by setting your expectations with the person who takes your order (unless you’re only ordering by QR). The Salt & Pepper Calamari has been amazing every time (I’ve had this at least 10 times) and in general the servings and sides in general are usually generous enough. The potato fries and sweet potato fries are 10/10.

My only gripe with the dining side is that kids meals used to come with an activity set, but this has dropped off over the last few visits, not sure why. A quick heads up - Be warned that the kids cheeseburger comes on a bun that has about 17 million poppy seeds, which is an extremely odd bun choice for a kids menu item. Other than that, my 2x kids love the steak and also the fish and chips.

The kids play area is great but often very chaotic. This has less to do with management and more to do with parents who let their kids run wild with no supervision (usually the older kids). If you’re one of those parents and reading this - be better. It would probably be a good option to have staff allocated to that area during busy periods that can also set some safety supervision boundaries for the kids play area, since there are always parents who “check out” and don’t responsibly monitor their kids.

Staff overall, especially in the servery area have always been kind and friendly (in my experience). There are some friendly bar staff, but sadly there are others who act like you’re wearing an invisible suit. The sports bar is chronically understaffed as for some reason the degenerate gamblers seem to take priority on the other side of the adjoining bar (in the gaming area).

I’m unhappy that they are still refusing to introduce a membership that locals can utilise to reduce the cost of overpriced beers/drinks. With the cost of living constantly rising, venues keep passing on these increases to us, the consumer, with no measure or reward for our patronage or loyalty. It’s a little questionable and greedy, in my own personal opinion.

All things said, even though it may sound contrary, I’m happy with my local. I hope to see them contributing to local community ventures, (eg sports team sponsorships etc.) as this will ultimately be what I’ll judge the venue and management on. This is something that other local clubs and pubs in the are do really well - like those run by Wests. A local pub should ALWAYS support the community that keeps it in business. I’d hope that Willowdale Hotel does this in the near future, and if they already do, I stand corrected.

Overall, give it a...

Both times visiting this hotel in 2 consecutive days and both days there were issues. I visited the hotel on a Friday morning (very quite), a friend and I ordered coffee and cake. My girlfriend ordered some hot chips for her to child to eat, we were told where we were sitting we were not able to consume hot chips there however it was ok to eat our cake/muffin and have our coffee in that spot...? We were asked to move to the other side of the bar should we want a bowl of hot chips. Hotel was clean and looked very nice inside however the rules were strange so we decided to leave and go somewhere we could feel more comfortable.

Saturday night I attended a birthday dinner, hotel was a full house. Considering the amount of people our order was ready within 30 mins, I felt was quite reasonable and the food was well presented and yummy. However I do agree with the rumours going around the playground is definitely not made for toddlers. We had a table in the playground area and the adults had alcoholic drinks, the security that came over was quite rude in telling us we were not allowed alcohol in this area. So from the beginning of the night the table became separated. I over heard another family after being told the same thing and a different security guard politely asked them to leave the area and understood it was their first time there etc however the security that came to our table was rude, didn't care that we had no idea as it was also everybody's first time there and pretty much told us to get up and leave yet we were allowed to drink around children on the other side of the door.

When booking this table in this particular area online if it was stated there that alcohol was not able to be consumed we would of booked elsewhere so maybe the website needs to clearly state these finer details to avoid these issues arising as well as some clear signage at the venue.

We ended up eating our dinner and leaving to continue cake and birthday celebrations elsewhere to suit the toddlers we have and the adults wanting to enjoy an alcoholic beverage with their family.

The toilets were quite dirty this time round, when the staff were notified of the mess and that the toilets were out of toilet paper the girl responded with show me, so off we went to show her, she didn't say a word once she saw the state of the bathrooms. We did not stick around long enough to see if anything was done about it but I am sure being so early in the night they would of got other complaints if it was not cleaned up.

Also I found there was not enough parking for such a big club, unless there's a hidden carpark I didn't see.

I was really looking forward to this hotel being our new local but unfortunately seeing these issues 2 days in a row at two completely different times of the day leaves me feeling quite uneasy about...