Paradiso Restaurant & Bar — Restaurant in Yamba

Paradiso is the word for great happiness, either a place or a state of mind. Ever heard of Dante Alighieri? Dante has a near death experience and ends up travelling through the realm of God’s Light. A realm that hardly can be remembered by mere mortals and is impossible to describe. He names it Paradiso. When the owners of this restaurant wondered what to call their restaurant, they asked their friends. And so, 11 years ago, Paradiso restaurant and bar was born. It has a bit of a Latin-American feel and vibe to it, yet there are plenty of Japanese decorations and the menu is inspired by our northern islands of Nippon as well. High quality cocktails such as classic margaritas (made with Cointreau) or negroni (made with Antico) and wines are on offer for a reasonable price. We were greeted by a lovely hostess, who was very accomodating, easy on the eye (to say the least) and nothing was too difficult or impossible. We ordered 6 dishes, all of which we shared. As we are pescatarians we had squid, prawns x2, kingfish and a mushroom bao as well. Delicious, delicious, delicious. Did I mention all of our servings were delicious? After completing our meals we moved to the bar area where we watched the sun go down and just chilled sipping on our cocktails. Visit Paradiso soon. The owners are ready for a new adventure in a country far, far away. Across the ocean somewhere...

Had a 2 hour booking for 7:45pm. Ordered drinks and food at the same time (about 8pm). Missed one Sangria order (which is fine), but when it came to food, we were left wonton. We asked at 8:35pm where our two servings of prawn wontons were (we ordered 2 for our group of 7). The young waitress proceeded to say she had already delivered them to our table and that the kitchen had closed at 8:30pm (despite our booking meant to be finishing at 9:45pm) so we couldn't get them anyway. We were a bit put out by this but chalked it up to an inexperienced waitress and human error. However, when it came time to pay, the manager tried to charge us for one serving of wontons while claiming "maybe we had had too much to drink" and couldn't remember the food we had eaten over the night (only having 2 drinks each and one sober person at the table). He kept referring to the young waitress who was standing next to him, using her as the scapegoat against all 7 of us saying we hadn't received the dish. She was completely manipulated by this manager and was obviously uncomfortable. Horrendous display of hospitality and will be letting everyone I know in Yamba to stay far away...

Great interior decor, music, and bar. $15 for most cocktails was excellent value.

Felt a bit disappointed by the food - the prawn wontons were swimming in soy sauce soup and had a modest amount of prawn in the filling (it felt like one prawn split among the four wontons in the serving), the pork dumplings were also swimming in a pool of chilli sauce (which we were assured would be ‘on the side’ but as it was all over the dumplings our fussy 11yo would not eat them which we’d ordered for his dinner), the Asian greens were drowned in a miso soup, and the dessert donuts were also in a soup of bland custard that tasted as though it were made from packet powder.

The pork belly and crispy duck were very tasty.

It was a bit irritating to be asked five times whether we were ok for drinks - we ordered some on arrival but were at the 5.30pm sitting with three children so were unlikely to be out on the raz. Felt like formulaic service, although it was nevertheless attentive and helpful overall.

Decent without...