Watsons Bay Boutique Hotel in Sydney

Ordered 2 x Fish tacos plus a couple of other dishes.
Food came out super quick considering how busy it was.
But… the fish tacos came out as fish and chips. I can push that part aside as the word fish may have been misheard. But when ordering at the bar up stairs, it seemed as though there were a lot of other workers there on their day off and the bar staff were to busy serving and trying to talk to their work friends.

I also saw the same guy who served me get approached from another customer about the beer he poured. It was a pint of Super dry and it had NO head on it as he was to busy talking to his friends.

Back to the food. The wait staff were good when I explained that it should have been fish tacos and they took the battered fish back. They came back about 10 minutes later with the Fish Tacos.
No refund was offered (didn’t expect a full refund) but there was an $8 difference between the two ($16 in total).
I understand it was super busy, but some basic customer service would have been good.
On the upside, food was good, location amazing!

But the service really does need some work in the bar areas.

I was incredibly disappointed with the service & food. We had to clear & clean our own table first from what looked to be 5-6 diners worth of food & drink residue & glasses left behind on the table (thank god I had some sanitized wipes in my bag). It seemed other patrons faced the same issues looking for napkins or anything to clean & clear their own tables with.
Sadly, after a perfect wagu rump on our last visit a year ago today; we were really looking forward to repeating the experience. Unfortunately the meals came with dressing running off the plate & our order of med-rare wagu rump, was as majority med to med-well done at best. I returned the meal & was promptly challenged by a rude & uptight waitress that it WAS med-rare as ordered. When asked if I’d like it back, I said no thank you as it was overdone she took it and left. When I went to the kitchen to have my meal refunded or at least re- made correctly, I was told that I was wrong & they insisted it was cooked MR. I showed them several photos of MR cooked beef & the rude blonde waitress refused to acknowledge them & kept insisting that chef said it was cooked correctly. I was refused a refund & also a replacement meal & left both hungry & pretty pissed off to say the least.
Basically, if you don’t want crap service & steak cooked by a chef who clearly doesn’t respect or understand the difference in cooks on beef - I 100% recommend you dine elsewhere.

Oh how the mighty Watsons Bay Hotel has fallen.

We arrived at 3pm — that purgatorial hour between lunch and regret — hoping for a civilised late meal with the family. Nothing heroic. Just the staples. Two fish and chips. A prawn linguine. A pizza. A flatbread. Safe bets. Or so we thought.

What arrived from the kitchen suggested a staffing crisis, a morale collapse, or perhaps a quiet act of culinary protest.

The prawn linguine lay there like a casualty of war — limp, overcooked, cold and defeated. No cherry tomatoes. No garnish. No pride. Just pale pasta staring back at me, asking where it all went wrong.

The chips? Stone cold. Not “cooling down” cold — 20-minutes-ago, abandoned-on-the-pass cold. Archaeological chips. Chips with a backstory.

The fish and chips followed the same sad trajectory: cold chips, lukewarm fish. To be fair, the fish itself had flavour — a brief flicker of hope in an otherwise bleak landscape.

We sent it back.

Twenty minutes passed.

When we finally asked where our food had wandered off to, we were cheerfully informed — cheerfully — that it had been sent to another table. Godspeed to them.

Another fifteen minutes later, salvation arrived. Or so we hoped. This time the fish and chips were aggressively overcooked, deep-fried into submission, as if the kitchen had swung wildly from apathy to vengeance.

The pizza, strangely, was excellent. A lone survivor. The only dish that seemed to come from a kitchen that still remembered why it existed.

At $175 for four meals, this place has officially crossed the Rubicon. Come for the drinks. Come for the view. Come for the atmosphere and the nostalgia.

But eat elsewhere.

0.5 stars.