Whitby's Restaurant & Bar

Rating: 1

We ate dinner here in May 2024.

Beef burger and chips
Lamb cutlets with cauliflower puree, beetroot, and broccolini

Dining out is a discretionary expense, and while there are certain intangibles involved that are hard to put a dollar value on, like not having to clean up after yourself, it’s generally clear when you are getting good value for money.

Likewise, it’s often excruciatingly clear when something is poor value. And while that’s definitely not the most important thing when you’re eating out, you hope that a restaurant leaves some kind of impact other than “what a ripoff.”

Whitby didn’t give a hoot about value for money. We ordered two cocktails that were almost indistinguishable from one another, however one was priced at $8 more than the other. The burger was more than four Big Mac’s worth of dollars, but certainly wasn’t more than four Big Mac’s worth of trouble. The lamb and its jus were probably the nicest things they served, although there was still some gristle, and the sides that came with it were wankily arranged to disguise that there was bugger all to actually eat. The vegetables were a cauliflower puree, roast beetroot, tepid brocollini and some mystery pale red thing - a yam?

A note about service. There were a lot of staff present, 7 visible at once at one point. Yet our burger we ordered without tomato came with tomato. Our plates sat on our table after we finished for far too long. In fact they were still there when we left, what if we’d wanted dessert? And to top it off, when we finally did go to leave, we waited at the hostess stand for an inordinate period with nobody around. It was long enough for the Fee-Rex to take a pen and to rearrange their staples on the counter.