Matilda Bay Restaurant and Bar, Crawley (second visit)
We haven’t visited the Matilda Bay restaurant for a long time (thirteen years). Looking back at my previous post the service was lacklustre and the food not very well presented, however I noticed that they were having a ‘Cray on the Bay’ promotion and I love crayfish, so we decided to try it again.
The location is perfect, right on Matilda Bay with yachts bobbing outside, the city lights in the distance, and wonderful doors that open up onto the view. We were seated in a nice booth. I ordered a glass of Eden Vale alcohol free sparkling wine, and set about looking at the menu. Nearly everything had a dairy free option – great for our dietary requirements. We decided on just bread and olives to start with the intention of enjoying the mains and maybe having a dessert afterwards. I asked for the bread to come with oil and balsamic instead of whipped butter, but the waitress said it comes drizzled with oil and salt. I would have preferred the oil to dip the bread, but this did not seem to be an option.
The bread was lovely, and lots of nice olives, although I really wish I had insisted on the dipping oil. My wine arrived too, but it wasn’t the Edenvale as advertised, it was McGuigan (equally nice), and there was no explanation about it being a different wine to the one that I ordered.
We were really enjoying the bread and olives, halfway through them, when all of a sudden our mains arrived and we had to quickly move the bread and olives out of the way.
My crayfish was disappointing, I expected a sauce or oil of some kind on it, but it was lumps of chilli, garlic and chives. It was also overcooked, same as last time I visited. I find that with dairy free options this often means removing the dairy item altogether rather than replacing it with an alternative. This really wasn’t a ‘sauce’ as advised, it was just dry ingredients. It would have been so easy to make a nice sauce with oil or a vegan butter or even a mayo.
My partner chose the market fish (dhufish) at market price ($69) with smoked baba ghanoush, beans and lavosh. The lavosh was like a thick piece of pastry and not really very good, so he left it. The fish was okay, but not tasty as you would expect from a fresh piece of premium fish at that price, the baba ghanoush was overly spiced and this was all that he could taste. Good baba ghanoush doesn’t need loads of spice, it’s all about the smoky eggplant, but this was sadly lacking.
Sides included duck fat potatoes, which were not that tasty. Duck fat usually adds so much flavour, but these were nothing special. There was supposed to be an aioli but I can only imagine that it had dairy and they removed it. It’s so easy to make dairy free aioli, but clearly not an option here.
The smoked mushrooms were the other side, nice meaty mushrooms, but not much evidence of smokiness. They must have removed the manchego crisp, but a little pangrattato wouldn’t have gone amiss. Another removal of an item rather than a replacement.
Anyhow we pressed on eating our mains and bread/olives at the same time, but it wasn’t an enjoyable experience. Maybe they rushed us because we weren’t drinking alcohol and hence not a very profitable table? We finished with quite a lot of potatoes and olives left and asked for them takeaway only to be told that we were not allowed to take food away. This is the first time I have ever heard of a Perth restaurant declining takeaway. By this point I couldn’t wait to leave, and asked the waiter for the bill. He asked how the meal was, and we both were non committal, so he said okay there’s a problem and asked us to explain. We mentioned the lack of takeaway, and the mains coming up before we had finished the starters. I didn’t get a chance to mention the other issues because he went into quite a defensive explanation about how bread wasn’t really a ‘starter’ and they had this issue before with customers. He said that some customers liked to have the bread with their other starters and mains, some didn’t. I said okay, then if you’ve had this issue before why not learn from it? Why not ask customers when they want their mains? He said okay we have something to learn. When I mentioned the takeaway issue he said that they were not allowed to do this because of food hygiene and the inability to guarantee that the food would be eaten within two hours. It was a bowl of potatoes, not really a high risk item, besides, I don’t think any takeaway establishment can guarantee when people eat the food and how it’s stored, so I’m not sure why they were quite so resistant to this. He said we could have asked for a ‘doggie bag’ which was apparently a different option. By this point I was really fed up. He complemented both sides which was good of him, but the meal still cost $155.
Great view, great environment, still poor service and not much care given to cooking quality or dietary requirements. I will not go again, it’s too far to travel for a whole load of disappointment. I do hope they learn from this, but I doubt that they will change anything.
Visit date – March 2025
Truly Scrumptious 
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