Twenty Nine Restaurant & Bar

We stopped here for a blended family lunch after my step-​brother swung by to catch up. This place won the «where do we go» lotto due to the online menu. One of the twins is an ‘almost vegetarian’. She dislikes the taste and texture of about 95% of all meat. So finding a place that offers more veggie options than plain pasta, salad, or soup is always a bonus.
The online menu had a veggie wrap with grilled and roasted vegetables, & a pesto aeoli. Sold.
The place itself is nice with both al fresco (unavailable when we got there) and inside dining. It overlooks the river and the view is quite pleasant. We were quickly helped to a table and sat down to decide.
Things went a little south at this point. The online menu didn’t match up with the physical one and there was no veggie wrap! The other changes didn’t matter so much but that was a biggie. However, they were willing to assemble one for us so problem solved.
We then waited. And waited. And waited. The food came out in a very staggered fashion to the extent that despite initially waiting a number of people ended up fully finished before the last plate arrived. There’s no excuse for that. If you run a restaurant, even if you’ve cut your staff down for the off-​season, you have to be able to serve the table in a timely fashion.
The last dish was the soup special too. I would have expected that to be among the first. We speculated that they’d either forgotten the dish or run out and needed to cook more — but with no actual communication from our server we’re still not sure.
Service issues aside, the staff were very friendly. And the mains were delicious.
Youngest ate nachos — an experience for her as she’s used to Cali-​Mex! Cheese corn chips as a base are, I think, an Australian thing: D There was a copious serving of chilli and healthy dollops of sour cream and guac. No salsa to her surprise but definitely very tasty.
Erin had the special — chicken and creamed corn soup. She’s become enamoured of this while in Australia. This one was apparently thick, hearty, and very flavourful.
Briannah’s whipped up wrap vanished — aside from the grilled eggplant. Not her thing. The wrap was stuffed with various veggies and slathered with a very tasty pesto aeoli.
I had fish and chips! Barramundi to be precise. I miss Aussie fish and chips badly. Apart from anything else, it’s harder to find a crappy serve! This one was beautiful. Fresh flaky barra coated in a very light and crispy batter. No soggy, gluggy, doughy batter here, thanks very much! And, as with all the dishes bar the nachos which were huge, it was a perfect size. Room for a treat afterwards.
Everyone else had burger things — open steak sandwich es, open beef burgers, open Turkish sandwiches. No idea on the particulars of each aside from they were delicious and disappeared quickly.
We did go for dessert. I wanted to like my dessert so much — passionfruit cheesecake — but I couldn’t. It looked fantastic however it was a little stale and the passionfruit topping was dried out and had too much gelatin. Very rubbery.
The coffee & macadamia cream cake looked gorgeous. It had a butter cream coffee icing studded with macadamia nuts. Unfortunately it had been chilled and the butter cream was very hard. Butter fresh from the coldest part of the fridge hard. So the flavours couldn’t unfold properly. Aside from that, it was tasty.
The angel cream cake with strawberries was also tasty although, again, too much gelatin in the glaze. And the butter cream filling was rather firm. The whipped cream and cake were good though.
Overall it was disappointing. I really wanted to like the place just because service was so friendly and the mains so tasty. But between the menu mismatch, delays, and the desserts I probably won’t.