Welcome Hotel

6 Average

Food  5      Drinks  7      Ambience  6      Service  6      Value  6     

With a little relief from the wet summer we are having. Last Sunday's blue skies gave us the opportunity to hit a pub beer garden. We thought we would try the Welcome at Rozelle after hearing some positive reviews.

Pub itself looks nice enough, I imagined the beer garden was going to be bigger but we obtained a table and seats easily enough at 12.30pm. Menu isn't large and prices are certainly reasonable.

Feeling like something light, I chose the tuna steak salad. Unfortunately, the tuna steaks were sold out and so they gave me the option of swordfish instead which I agreed to. Overall the dish was just ok. I felt the fish was a bit overcooked and the salad was really tart.

Feb 07, 2012 

9 Highly Recommended

Food  9      Drinks  10      Ambience  9      Service  9      Value  8     

Strongly recommend this place - great beers on tap that you won't find other places and decent wines by the glass as well. Best place to watch the footy - if the pub is too packed, you can watch it on the screen in the beer garden. I like bringing people here who haven't been before - they're always pleasantly surprised when they discover it.

Jul 19, 2011 

8.4 Highly Recommended

Food  9      Drinks  8      Ambience  8      Service  10      Value  7     

Ate at the restaurant with my partner. The food was very nice! The restaurant was really nice. Service was great. Only negative thing is they need a door separating the bar and restaurant, when it's really busy, it can get noisy from the people in the bar. Would eat here again.

Jun 16, 2011 

3.2 Below Average

Food  5      Drinks  3      Ambience  3      Service  3      Value  2     

I'm not too sure who received the bribe. Three schooners? Who are they kidding? I have frequented other recommended venues awarded the same or less and have found them to be fantastic and well deserved of such an award, the pub food here is unimaginative, flat, slop. With some of the items looking like the chef had chewed on them and spat them onto the plate.

I realise that this may seem a little harsh, but with Rozelle being touted as a destination for diners, and this hotel being one of the main recommendations - I guess my expectations were a little too high? On a brighter note, the venue is quite beautiful, and the restaurant looks fantastic. But I don't believe I will ever get to try it as I will not be back!

May 11, 2011 

8.6 Highly Recommended

Food  9      Drinks  7      Ambience  9      Service  10      Value  8     

Very enjoyable meal. Entrees both fantastic. Raviolini filled with crab and scallop was divine. Mains brought the score down a little with not so tender steal arriving - in saying that, the flavours were good. Wine lost could have some reds with a bit more age on them but the wait staff were lovely and very eager to make suggestions

Jan 27, 2011 

8.8 Highly Recommended

Food  8      Ambience  10      Service  10      Value  7     

Wooo Hooo! I have finally found somewhere that I can sit outside for dinner and not have any filthy smokers stinking up the air with their cigarette smoke or any other noxious odour. This only applies to the restaurant's outdoor section, not the beer garden.

If you want somewhere with good food and service that has a smoke free courtyard this is the place for you! Our food was good and the service was excellent. They were very attentive, bread was freshly baked and nothing we had was a disappointment.

We had mains only, 2 glasses of wine each and left a 10% tip. Grand total of $100 which wasn't great value for money but not to bad either. I will definitely be going there again this summer.

Nov 22, 2010 

9 Highly Recommended

Food  8      Ambience  9      Service  10      Value  9     

We had a ball at the Welcome Hotel in Rozelle, we were a party of eight for a Thursday night and had a table in the Court Yard area beyond the pretty dining room. Our night started with drinks at the bar which is really a proper irish/english pub (and ended there when we adjourned after our meal for a cleansing ale, a fab pint of guinness for most of us and quite the best I've had in Sydney).

The restaurant was nicely busy and nearly full of tables having fun so it was great to be sitting amongst it. The service was excellent, we felt really looked after, well cared for. The food was delicious, lobster ravioli, goat's cheese souffle, kingfish and pork rack were stand out favourites beautifully presented and tasty, tasty. One of my friends thought the menu read really well altogether with some excellent twists on lamb, pork and spatchcock.

The wine list was a good, interesting read and we enjoyed a special and gorgeous Printhie Cab sav and some Micelli Chardonnay. We couldn't all manage a pudding, but we shared a warm chocolate fondant (yum) and a date and coffee slice with a selection of cheeses with honeycomb which was heavenly. All up we had a lovely evening, a good party at the Welcome, highly recommended.

Nov 02, 2010 

5.8 Average

Food  3      Ambience  8      Service  8      Value  4     

Came to the Welcome to meet friends for a beer or two. I noticed that it was participating in the Coopers $20 for a pie and a schooner of Coopers competition. Having had the excellent Riverview Hotel's pork and apple (with mustard, mashed potatoes and peas on the side) I thought I'd go for it. No pork pie here though, it was to be a chicken pie.

I won't beat around the bush, the pie was awful. It came in one of those small casserole dishes with a very thin pie crust over it. A thin Burny pie crust over it.
So I flipped off the pie crust to be greeted by a chicken pie, with mozzarella cheese melted through it. Yes, that was mozzarella cheese, as seen on pizzas, or in a tomato and mozzarella salad. Cheese? In a chicken pie?

Being a curious and open-minded sort of person I thought I'd give it a go. It tasted as awful as it both sounds and looks. Cheese, and its released oils do not go with an over-thickened gravy with chicken in. Cheese makes other things taste like cheese, it should never have made it into a pie. The pie comes with sort of corn mush in a ramekin, which was pretty bad as well.

This pie was the sort of thing that a student would cook and be pretty happy with (“there was mozzarella in the fridge as well so I just bunged that in too”). I gave away my pie after my one fork-full to the human dustbin who was sitting with us. After he'd slathered it in tomato sauce, salt and pepper in an effect to eliminate the blandness he did confess he was just shovelling it in for the sake of it.

I wasn't alone in my dis-satisfaction with this particular pie. The afore-mentioned human dustbin had tried it the previous night and was of the same opinion, so too was my other companion on his pie. This was a pie in a name only, and a travesty to the good names of pies worldwide. I can't understand how they got it so wrong as the beef and Guinness pie that I've enjoyed there over the years has been such a consistent performer.

Needless to say that night I visited the Riverview Hotel and satisfied myself with its (soon to be) champion offering.

Oct 25, 2010 

5.8 Average

Food  3      Ambience  9      Service  7      Value  4     

The atmoshere is great. I had a pie last night and it was terrible, can make a lot better at home and wouldn't feed it to my dog.

Sep 26, 2010 

7.3 Recommended

Food  6      Ambience  9      Service  9      Value  5     

Still the best pub on the Balmain Peninsula but had the $24.50 steak last night and it had too much fat. Expect more for this price. We really had to do a lot of picking around. Also the mash portion has shrunk over the years. Now it's too small. The onion rings and gravy were still good however.

Hope this dosesn't signal a decline in standards. My other gripe about the otherwise fab Welcome is that sometimes it is hard to find a table in the pub. In these case surely they should allow patrons to eat from the bar menu in the restaurant.

Sep 09, 2010