Toscanini’s On Quay

Great location and menu sounds good but every time we go we have a problem so now we avoid it. Problems have included: meals served with a dead fly in it, poor service upon arrival to assist finding table, & worst of all poorly presented food with no green garnish which in my book is below standard for the price. Last time we did breakfast at Hillarys we walked around checking the prices and looking at the meals of all the cafes and in the end found the best value for money for eggs and spinach on toast was at Dome. Couldn’t get any breakfast greens at all at Toscanini’s.

We just got coffees each and kids fish and chips for the little one… we all wish we’d ordered our own as they were delicious! Very fresh and beautiful fish! The little one was lucky to get half her meal as we kept on nicking it! We will definitely be back!

Considering some bad reviews I have read, we really enjoyed it. Beautiful seafood platter and kids meals were good. Wait staff very friendly and lovely outlook looking over the water.

I have been here a couple times for breakfast and it seems they are a little inconsistent. We went in December and then in January. The service was average and the staff were ok. The restaurant itself is nicely set out and clean, lovely music playing in the background. My partner had the pancakes both times we have recently been here because the first time we went they were amazing however this time they were below average. Overlooked, hard and not fluffy. Also the milkshakes used to come in bigger serve, they’ve now been downsized. I had the salmon eggs Benedict. Delicious, though no points for presentation. I’m hoping my latest experience was just a one off.

My girlfriend decided she wants to celebrate her birthday lunch at Hillary’s but hasn’t decided where or what she wants to eat. I suggested a few places to her but after all, birthday girl gets to decide right?
We finally settled here at Tocanini’s. Having been here on a previous occasion, its kinda a simple order-​get your food-​eat your food & leave kind of restaurant. Pricing isn’t that bad for Perth with a fabulous view. Well, i was actually disappointed after reading a few bad reviews. I bet to differ… I quite like it here. The venue is great, service & food’s good. The only little thing i think which can be improved is being such a big restaurant, why not take orders from the table instead of ordering at the counter inside?
Let me share my experience with you. I ordered Eggs benedict. i guess if you’re a Unilocaler & reads my reviews, you must have figured that out already. So there i am happily eating my eggs benedict & halfway through my meal, a seagull swooped in & took half of my meal… well, it tried to take it & it ended up all over the table. I freaked out. In the next second, the waitress came & apologised. Cleared the table & offered to bring me another serving. I told her, its not her fault, she doesn’t have to apologise to me & just bring me half the serve. Guess what? She came back with a full plate of Eggs Benedict. I felt bad as i knew i won’t be able to finish it… But with that gesture by making their customer happy, they deserve shout-​out & a good review. Overall, I had an awesome time with the birthday girl & friends. Not a complain from them. Food & drinks were promptly served.
Bathroom easily accessible for its patrons. Very clean-​acceptable.
Will i go back? Yeah i would, why not? At least if the seagull ever decides to share my meal again, i would get another at no charge.

Customers order at the counter but the lady there was not very pleasant… we didn’t feel welcome at all. Also a 3% surcharge on Eftpos transactions? Really? Staff should inform customers about this before they use Eftpos, rather than rely on a tiny note (that I only saw after I paid). It’s just courtesy.
I was looking forward to a salad but at $ 27 I thought it was ridiculous (believe me, this is not a nice enough place to be charging those prices.) We opted for the Winter specials menu — $ 16 for sausages and mash, and $ 18 for roast chicken, chips and salad. The meals were surprisingly good — the quarter of roast chicken was cooked to tender in a homemade jus. Both meals were generous in size.
We had a couple of beers, and it’s a nice place to sit out and observe the goings on of the marina (there is the option to sit outside or inside… and we moved inside when the sun ducked between the clouds). Not sure I’d dine here again (on the regular menu), as there are so many other restaurants to choose from at Sorrento Quay.

We thought rather than ordering takeaway one Saturday night, we’d go out for a quick meal… quick being the word.
After strolling around Hillary’s marina, we settled on Toscaninis as the wait was too long at Little Caesars (our first choice).
We were seated and ordered drinks, which took forever to come out. We waited to order and finally, a very scruffy looking Brazilian guy in a t-​shirt and shorts came over. When offered salad or veggies, we asked what the veggies were and he shrugged and said «carrots, potatoes». When the meal arrived (finally), it was broccoli and snow peas.
We waited an hour for our meals and watched people around us who had arrived later get their meals, eat and leave before ours had even arrived. We asked several times to check on our meals and each time were told they were «coming».
The food finally arrived (a chicken parmigiana and scaloppini Marsala) and was run of the mill. Fine, but nothing special and certainly not worth an 80 minute wait in a café that wasn’t full.
One of the waitresses was apologetic and offered us a free wine. We’d already had wine and didn’t want another because we were driving. So I was disgusted to find the original wines still on our bill at the end with no discount.
It was a terrible customer service experience due to the tacky looking wait staff who clearly wanted to be somewhere else.
This place only survives due to its location.

A crappy experience in paradise.
The starter plate was good, with crumbed olives, arancini, and mushrooms on bread — but what followed was a culinary nightmare …
In short:
— Over priced — not good value at all!
— Bad service — we waited forever
— Fish was awful — a crumbed lot of soggy white mush
— Prawn pasta was horrible with overcooked pasta immersed in creamy one dimensional flavoured garlic cream glue with some prawns thrown on top
— the puttanesca sauce was good but again the pasta was over cooked.
I don’t recommend the place for pasta or seafood. They might be ok with tapas but the service needs to be better.

I went to Toscanini’s for a mother daughter catch up coffee.
It began with the waitress telling us we looked like twins, which was slightly awkward, not really true and seemed a little too suck up-​y.
Lucky we were busy writing a list because it took forever for the restaurant to conjure up two coffee. After about a half a 25 minute wait when the restaurant had five people in it not including us.
They didn’t provide napkins with the coffee which was a bit annoying.
We were hungry but we decided not to eat here for two reasons;
1. If that was how long the coffee took we didn’t want to stick around for food;
2. I thought it was a bit pricey and I was pissed off.
I like though, that it is fully licensed and you can serve your own water considering you can’t rely on the service. Not sure if I will come back here.

Now occupying the old Breakwater’s prized location, Toscanini’s is set to continue a long history of good food and good vibes. Okay so they might not serve the alcohol (yet — apparently it’s coming), but they do whip up an awesome breakfast, and you can’t go past the Toscanini’s lunch roll. The lunch menu here is actually more extensive than its Applecross counterpart, with a massive gourmet and panini selection as well as oysters, seafood platters, homemade burgers and more. They also do dinner, with pizzas, pastas, steaks, seafoods and other Italian mains gracing the menu. Once this place has its liquor license it’ll be pretty special indeed.

We all have that one meal that we regularly crave and for me that is the calamari from Toscanini’s, and nothing else can satisfy me quite the same. It’s a whopping serving of the tastiest squid rings (choose to have them battered or grilled) with a pile of crispy chips on the side and a fresh garden salad to finish it off, all for $ 25. I never need to even look at the menu at Toscanini’s because the calamari constantly delivers. If you want to try squid at it’s best, calamari fritti it is! Don’t ask me how I manage it, but afterwards I squeezed in a vanilla milkshake too. I was sorry afterwards because I literally thought I was going to explode but that still didn’t stop me from polishing it all off.

Toscanini’s is great, it is often my go to place, especially for breakfast. I have had numerous amount of catch ups here. They do a really good strawberry milkshake, I am a really big fan of milkshakes, strawberry being the preference. If ever I go somewhere that sells milkshakes I am more than likely to try one, and in this case I did. It was really nice, not too sweet and not to thick. It is hard to please me when it comes to milkshakes but they did, and I have been back many times just to sit by the harbour in the sun drinking it.
The cakes are really good too, as is the food. The customer services is nothing to rave about. I think the highlight (other than the milkshake) is the location and the interior design. It was renovated, almost a year ago and it made a huge difference it is really classy and a nice way to spend a saturday afternoon!

Let’s begin by applauding Toscanini’s on Quay for seeking out a liquor licence. That licence is currently pending: it’s hard to imagine that it won’t be granted and easy to see what a feather in the café’s cap it will be. Sporting one of the best views of Hillarys boat harbour on the quay, Toscanini’s is already the place to order a coffee and sit watching the gulls and the swimmers and the boats. Soon it will be the place to order a glass of white wine – or, even better, a bottle – and do the same thing.
For the time being, one can still appreciate the café’s location, ambience and coffee, the latter of which is probably the best I have had down at the quay. The Sorrento branch of a tree that has others in both Bicton and Applecross, Toscanini’s also claims to have the largest selection of cakes in Perth’s northern suburbs. Looking at their selection, you’d be hard-​pressed to call them liars.
As with almost everything around these parts, the prices are slightly higher than one might like, with everything from breakfast to dinner seeming to cost three or four dollars more than it perhaps should. No one will ever convince me that eggs benedict should set a person back twenty dollars, but at least Toscanini’s throws in coffee or juice for your troubles. Dinners are limited to steaks and pastas most of the week, with a full à la carte menu available on Fridays and Saturdays. In any case, one needn’t eat here to get the most out of it. A couple of coffees, a good book, and the breeze of the water suit me nicely.