Restaurant Meal: Rye Hotel Bistro

Seafood platter and banana split

Rye Hotel is at 2415 Pt Nepean Road, Rye 03 5985 2277

This is a restaurant that positively encourages you to bring kids, it has an indoor playground that has been carefully planned for little and big kids alike.

The menu is pub bistro standard, order at the bistro counter type stuff, covering a vast array of things with chips and salad. I ordered the seafood platter which consists of several gourdons of battered and deep fried fish, a battered and deep fried scallop (with coral, yum!), a couple of deep fried calamari rings, a spring roll filled with prawns, a beautifully cooked piece of squid, a chilli prawn on a skewer, a couple of battered and deep fried prawns, chips and a green salad with a lemon vinegarette. The squid was just perfect, tender and tasty but the rest were fish'n'chips shop standard; a bit of a disappointment.

The banana split however was another story altogether, it was simply divine if completely oversized (it was americanesque in it's enormonity). The deserts at the Rye Hotel are prepared by the person taking your order at the bar and in my case the order taker was a frustrated desert chef, she literally took 10 minutes to make this masterpiece and it consisted of banana (carefully sliced into 3 pieces, two bananas were discarded after peeling as less than perfect), vanila ice-cream carefully formed into quinelles, a tasteful smear of chocolate sauce, an artful sprinkling of crushed peanuts (which she crushed on the spot from a jar of pre-roasted nuts) and the only grating item was the addition of those premade tublar wafers. All in all the masterpiece was a joy to consume, except for the guilt of leaving some behind due to gastro-intestinal fatigue.


Cost of meal: $30 (25 for the seafood platter, 5 for the divine split)
Time to serve: About 10 minutes (how long can it take to pull something from the freezer, deep fry it and then whack it on a plate prepared with salad)
Rating: 8/10 if you have kids, 6/10 if you don't.