Robert
Google
You know when you go out to dinner and the food is so nice and there's so much of it and you feel like you ate too much, but you wouldn't change a thing? There's not much risk of that happening at the Bathers Pavillion.
The food is pretty nice, but there's not that much of it. Despite being astonishingly expensive, the meals don't come with vegetables. They want you to anticipate both the taste of the main dish, and how frugal the servings are, select matching vegetables, which they charge a lot extra for. I'm not just upset that once you've found a way to justify the enormous expense of this place in your head, they make it clear that it doesn't cover a full meal, but also, it feels like they're really abandoning their responsibitly. If you're serving duck, what does it go with? if you're serving whiting, what else goes with that? This is an opportunity for the chef to be creative and find interesting or at least complimentary accompaniments, but it seemed a bit lazy.
I apologise for belabouring this point but when you do pay extra for veggies, the options are (literally, I'm not making this up, you can check their website): potatoes, salad, beans, and carrots, the four most boring options imaginable. My mum used to bribe me with dessert to eat this stuff, no such luck at the Bathers Pavillion.
The menu offers 2 or 3 courses, but they don't provide a dessert menu unless you ask, so, you don't necessarily know if you want 2 or 3, and if you've decided to have 2, you don't know if it should be an entree and a main or a main and a dessert.
The service was a bit meh, we had to pester them for wine, then they didn't ask the others if they wanted soft drinks, and they didn't return during the meal to see if we wanted anything more to drink. They did surreptitiously fill up our water glasses, which was nice, but they missed an opportunity to get more money out of us, by not offering us more drinks.
There's a great view, and lot of natural light, but not a lot of internal light, and it's a bit noisy.
Miscellaneous: The sourdough bread was excellent. The main meal knives were a bit blunt and not quite up to the task. The soap in the bathroom was a bit gritty (I understand that this is probably some fancy exfoliating thing rather than a result of someone refilling the soap dispensers with sandy beach hands).