Ohtel Pantry

Rating: 1

We ate dinner here in August 2023.

Sausage roll Prosciutto, parmesan, and cheddar toasted sandwich Orange cake Baked cheesecake

Ohtel, stop it. Stop serving dinner when you are not equipped to do so. You are kidding yourself if you think tonights dinner was alright, or even passable. We get that you want to sell some evening drinks. You’ve got somebody sitting around at reception, might as well make use of them. Fair enough. But instead of trying to run a kitchen, do a charcuterie, or maybe just bread and dips. Then you wouldn’t have to have a cook on site either. Oh wait, you didn’t. Your chef didn’t even show up on a Friday night, which made half the menu unavailable.

The truth is, they don’t really expect anyone to eat there. Some of Wellingtons best restaurants are easy walking distance, why would anybody eat at Ohtel? They wouldn’t, and we were the only ones there in yet another sad empty hotel restaurant.

The sausage roll, which came from the cabinet, was the highlight of the evening. The fennel sausage was pretty good, and the was pastry reasonable but suffered from being reheated. It was served with a bulk purchased, anaemic tomato sauce. The toasted sandwich, which was at least made fresh, was pretty bad. The bread was apparently sourdough. Don’t let that trick you into thinking it’s a gourmet homemade loaf. This was Ploughman’s sourdough at best. The meat was plentiful but extremely salty. While only prosciutto was listed on the menu, we suspect there was some surreptitious bulking out with some ham. The cheese was barely detectable. We did spot a couple of slivers of cheese, but didn’t taste any, and there was certainly no oozy cheesy toastie goodness. The side salad was terrible. It had a flavourless oil all over it so it just tasted like you were eating a pile of lettuce. There was some pickled red onion on the salad but that tasted like nothing.

The cakes were a let down, especially at $10 apiece. We shouldn’t have been surprised by this. A couple of years ago we stayed a night at Ohtel. It was very overpriced, our room didn’t even have a window! They had not nailed the texture of the baked cheesecake, it was crumbly and bland, and there was even a piece of baking paper still on the bottom for some reason. The orange cake was super dry. It came with some yoghurt, but in a quantity that was not nearly enough for such a dry cake.