Radius Cafe

I remember coming here as a kid when I stayed at the Vibe hotel. This place holds many memories for me, I loved it.

Breakfast:
Emma and the chef needs a champion award. They are so friendly and couldn’t go out of their way to do more. The pastry’s are 100% better than what’s offered at Sofitel Melbourne. In the weekend the team kept the kitchen open until at least 10:30am and the amount of happy customers reflected their ability to be human.

The Bar:
Half the cocktails were missing due to not having basic fresh produce (eg. Mint which is a darn weed that should be grown in-house) and during the week there was very limited staff, friendly, however most with limited experience. The permanent locally employed staff on Thursday evening were what you would expect ‘if not more..’ from a high quality bar.

Happy Hour:
It wasn’t the strongest deal for customers! The pub has better deals without having a deal! Cocktail from $20 down to $15 and wine from ~$13 down to $9-.

Dinner (Off-Peak) Wed:
Wednesday night dinner the steak had no potato Gratin available at the start of the night (hence not prepared) and was replaced with French fries. The service and food was great and fast to bring out after a very long wait for the restaurant to take the order.
Another note was on Friday the one Pizza guy was sick so no Pizza.

Lunch:
Saturday Lunch (only) was busier than they expected and the food was depleted before dinner (ran out of pizza bases) so no Pizza Sat night.

Dinner (Peak) - Sat Night:
*go to the pub!!*
There was NO Shiraz by the glass, and many others not available, this seems to be a major lack of management/oversight by the GM and there didn’t seem to be a competent f&b manager. The hotel manager (Harry) from reception came accross and frankly the place would have been a ridiculous mess if he didn’t step in to help, it was like watching roam being built in a day. Harry running back and forth from the hotel to restaurant showed he’s a worker that frankly if they didn’t have would be best shutting down. I found out he’s living local and Accor should assign him as a GM to bring stability into this hotel. Thanks Harry for your efforts at every turn of this hotel.

Once an order was in it was a really quick and a reasonable turn around. We ordered the same steak, Medium. One was Medium/Well-done, mine came out cooked between well done and tomorrow’s microwave reheat.

After sending it back and being patient for over 45 minutes, I requested an update twice of which the waitress said it should be over shortly. The waitress then cleared the table and asked how it was the second time, I was still waiting. The manager checked around 20 minutes after the kitchen stuff up. 90+ minutes from returning the main it finally came out. The cook was either annoyed or being a complete D*^k. I was given the excuse the kitchen was busy, the issue here was the chef ‘or fill in for the night’ were frankly disgraceful and disrespectful to have a Platimun ‘or any’ person waiting 6 times longer than the original serving when the kitchen had stuffed up the order.

My wife left with our baby, we didn’t get desert, and my 2yo was over tired by the time I had my steak.

So this was not only a great or dining experience it was a POOR experience at every level to Finnish our last (4th night) at the hotel.

I noticed another almost full steak just left on another table ‘not a great sign’ they tried to give chips again which we strongly requested not to have been if there was another option.

The food when done right was very nice, the customer service was lacking in staffing, however the GM is clearly not on-top of this hotel let alone the area of F&B. When I asked for the GM, I found she was on holidays. Everyone deserves a holiday but once they have their house in order, please get your F&B sorted, let a lone your hotel before going on ‘holiday’ wow! I can only assume there is a high turn over of staff here and you would have to be blind to ‘just’ blame that on others. There are 3-4 staff I can see who are holding up the tent and it isn’t a long term viable fix to the issues occurring here.