Merimbula Lakeview Hotel

The venue is amazing and the service was good, but the food needs work. My seafood linguine was dry enough that I asked for extra olive oil, which was no trouble. What really let it down was the seafood: canned salmon and two small prawns with no taste aren’t what I expect in a seaside town. My partner’s Carbonara was gluggy and, like my dish, short on flavour. Why not lift the food to match the venue?

There’s an incredible view of the lake that makes the place feel peaceful. The staff are really friendly, service is quick, and the drinks menu is large. I tried several dishes and they were all delicious, with generous portions. Definitely somewhere I’d recommend and come back to.

We used to have nice meals here in other years, and the location and view are spectacular, so it was disappointing to find Lakeview hotel had gone downhill. We ate there Sunday night. We couldn’t get a booking before 7:30pm, which was fine, but after ordering two Parmas, one with vegetables instead of salad, a pasta and a vegetarian ravioli, the first three meals arrived without my friend’s dish. She had ordered before us. After waiting another ten minutes, she asked, and they said they’d forgotten her order and it would take about 30 minutes. That’s unacceptable. She should have been offered a free drink or garlic bread for the wait. The vegetables were inedible, all I could taste was salt. I told the driver, but he didn’t care. If I’d read the reviews before booking, I would have known. Please improve the meals and customer service. It shouldn’t be hard to process an order that someone has paid for.

Lunch here today was awful. The buzzer we got was flat, so we didn’t know our food was ready and had to ask after waiting a while. When it came, it was only lukewarm. The natural and Kilpatrick oysters were small and disappointing, especially in an oyster farming area, and the Kilpatrick ones weren’t even all covered in sauce. I ordered the kids’ flathead tails because the market fish of the day was orange roughy, which I didn’t want. They charged more for the kids’ meal and served what I assume was roughy. It was tasteless mush under the worst, thick batter I’ve had, and the chips were cold. The spring rolls were overcooked too. Tartare sauce and the waiting staff were the only nice things. It was a very disappointing $170 meal in a tourist town. We soon saw why it wasn’t as busy as other eateries. We don’t recommend eating there at all.