[info]
When? – 8/11/12
Where? – 18-38 Siddeley Street, Melbourne
Price? - $22
Website? - http://wharfhotel.com.au/
Reviewers – Adam, Fridge, Lee, Nikki, Stefo[/info]
Two weeks ago The Wharf Hotel won the facebook vote by a pretty big landslide (20 votes to the Wharf, 12 for Deluxe Bar and 3 for Naughtons Parkville Hotel). Then stuff came up last week that prevented us from doing a review so this week we loaded up the parma bus and headed to the docklands, and the Wharf Hotel. Voting for next week’s attempt will be live on the facebook page till Monday night, go and tell us where to go!
Located within the World Trade Center complex (across the river from Polly Woodside) The Wharf Hotel is an impressive pub. Beautiful beer garden right on the river, complete with plenty of plasma screens and an outdoor fireplace, not to mention the gorgeous interior with extremely cosy leather lined booths, which is where we found ourselves last night…
Straightforward. We placed our orders and before too long we were greeted by our parmas -
At first glance the parma looked solid, the crumbs on the schnitzel were quality and it seemed to be of decent thickness, kinda small, but thick. It wasn’t until we took a bite that we were let down.
While being thick, the chicken was as dry as a dead dingo’s donger, dry and stringy, I had to take sips of my pint between each mouthful to retain a bit of moisture.
The toppings were okay, but they were just bland. Boring, dull and humdrum (thanks thesaurus.com!). The napoli was tasteless, the ham probably carried the most flavour out of all the toppings (and thats not saying much) and the cheese was … just cheese.
Nothing about the parma was particularly offensive, but it wasn’t good, and it certainly wasn’t twenty-two dollars good.
Not much to say about the chips - McDonalds fries, decent seasoning and well cooked but not many of them, If a pub is resorting to fries over chips then I want a healthy serve of them.
Now, to be fair to what I’m about to say about the salad, the menu did state that the parma was served with “leafy greens” and not “salad”. But whatever you call it, it was rocket and a few slivers of onion tossed in oil. A complete afterthought and not worth the effort of putting it on the plate.
As the review team mentioned in their comments, if this was a $10 parma I would have left satisfied, but $22 for a small parma with Maccas chips and weeds on the side left a very bad taste in our mouths.
Apparently they run a $15 novelty parma Monday which would be worth checking out (inexplicably these ones are served with “steak chips” and not fries. why not put the steak chips on the full sized parma!?) That would be worth checking out, but I wouldn’t go too far our of my way to get there.
An aesthetically amazing pub in a fantastic location with a top notch view. Too bad the parma was such a let down.
Parma - 5.30
Chips - 4.70
Salad - 3.40
Value - 3.80
Total - 4.50
