Embers Restaurant and Bar

Pleasant, in-house hotel dining: the menu contains few surprises but the food is well-cooked and the staff are friendly.

Address

Mercure Hotel, 156 Bathurst St, Hobart City, TAS, 7000

-42.88396 147.321424

Contact Details

Phone:

Work (03) 62326224

Website:

http://www.mercure.com.au

Restaurant Summary

Cuisine:

Modern Australian

Editorial Review

A comfortable, rather plainly appointed, starched linen restaurant with a menu perfectly matched to the mainly tourist and house-guest clientele: oysters natural or Kilpatrick, a small pizza selection, chicken Caesar, fish and chips, chicken parmigiana, eye fillet and lamb cutlets plus half-shell scallops; and a Tasmanian seafood platter with hot-smoked salmon to let diners know they’re in Tasmania. What they do, they do fairly well – a generous slab of salmon perfectly smoked to order, still moist and pink at the centre, and quite delicious dressings on the calamari, octopus and side order of garden salad.

The service is excellent and friendly from menu-literate and well informed staff, while live jazz spices things up and attracts a good local crowd on Friday and Saturday nights. The only real problem comes with the wine list, with only a few entry-level local wines and the others little better than weekend specials in a suburban bottleshop, at what many might consider unreasonably high prices. But that’s a common problem in hotel restaurants worldwide and, with quite a few of the wines available by the glass, diners can readily match consumption to the depth of their pockets.

Graeme Phillips, March 2007