What an odd, characterless place! Vitner's Retreat is a brand new restaurant and is roughly only one of three winery restaurants open on Monday nights. On entering the restaurant, the first impression is that the designer must have been blind--either that or they didn't hire one and decided to wing it.
The restaurant is a large room with dark grey walls, a light grey carpet, and wicker chairs. The restaurant lacks any sort of character, charm, or romantic atmosphere. For some reason, they then decided to put Hawaiian-style paintings on one of the walls (extremely bright) that didn't seem to go with anything.
The fireplace, also painted grey, had an urn of lilies covering it, and lilies
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What an odd, characterless place! Vitner's Retreat is a brand new restaurant and is roughly only one of three winery restaurants open on Monday nights. On entering the restaurant, the first impression is that the designer must have been blind--either that or they didn't hire one and decided to wing it.
The restaurant is a large room with dark grey walls, a light grey carpet, and wicker chairs. The restaurant lacks any sort of character, charm, or romantic atmosphere. For some reason, they then decided to put Hawaiian-style paintings on one of the walls (extremely bright) that didn't seem to go with anything.
The fireplace, also painted grey, had an urn of lilies covering it, and lilies were the flower choice placed on every table. It was then that I realized the whole place was reminiscent of a funeral home and wondered whatever possessed them to design their new restaurant like this. Very odd.
Moving on... On a positive note, the service was friendly and fast. We both ordered rack of lamb ($29 N.Z) and a side of roast potatoes. When the lamb came, however, the first thought that sprang to mind was, "Where's the meat?" since we were faced with four small racks of fat. I know, of course, that rack of lamb has fat on it, and the meat here is supposed to be the most tender of the whole lamb since the fat protects it. But this was just ridiculous—neither of us had ever seen such fatty bits of lamb before. To make matters worse, when the potatoes arrived, they were basically overcooked new baby potatoes—there was nothing roasted about them.
We didn't bother to check out dessert, even though we were both still hungry, and we both decided that this was a good place to come if you were on a diet, since apart from a few mouthfuls of meat, there was nothing left to eat. Both of us felt rather depressed after spending so much money on a hugely disappointing dinner.
I really would not recommend it.
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