HUX Dining

An awful service and staff morality!!!
I’ve bought a voucher from Groupon 2 – 3 months ago, I’ve booked to have a dinner on 19 AUG 2015. When we got there (my fiancé and me), the lady who spouse to serve us showed me a very small table just beside kitchen door as our table. I wasn’t happy with the location of table, she told us «I can’t do anything about it, you have to sit there !!!» while there was 4 – 5 vacant table at the restaurant. She was very rude and I haven’t seen someone with that rudeness in my entire life. I will never ever step in this restaurant again.

We were on a voucher for 8 for $ 230, about $ 29 per person. It was a shared meal of 850g Wagu Steak, two sides, sauce and a bottle of wine. When you look at the website, I could not find what we had on that menu. The only mention of the 850g Wagu was on various vouchers. Not a cheap meal but we hoped that they could convince us to return.
The restaurant had another group of 8 and a table of 2, not on a voucher, for lunch. We did not pay extra for entrée and waited for the main meal; just as well we had the wine and plenty to talk about. The red Pinot Noir was OK and the white chardonnay was fine. The meat was excellently cooked and the pick of the salads/​sides was the potato chorizo salad, vegetables and chips. You can cheerfully give the others a miss unless you are wedded to a green salad or wedges.
Only a couple backed up for dessert. That amount of meat in the main meal plus a pretty uninspiring menu for dessert just left the rest of us to have coffee. All of which was extra.
I had a very interesting looking macchiato but it was OK.

In my own humble opinion, the food here has some refinement work to do in order to place itself in the fine dining category (as the prices seem to infer). This is what I had (or tasted from others in my party) on the night. Let’s start with what I thought best to paint the restaurant in the kindest light:
Dessert: Basil panna cotta with fresh strawberries. The taste and texture of the panna cotta were both gorgeous. Taste balance… fantastic. Loved the refreshing basil flavour in the panna cotta and it was an awesome idea to consider the ingredient.
Dessert: White chocolate crème brûlée with a dark chocolate mousse with berry sauce. The tastes went together perfectly — particularly between the berry sauce and the mousse. In fact both desserts we ordered were well worth the visit.
Entrée: Lobster tail cooked at a constant 50 degrees: the soup could be a little more acidic, and personally I prefer that soup to be served a little warmer. The lobster, taste-​wise was ok, but the texture was good.
Entrée: Snapper chowder: the taste of the soup was fine and held its own. The only comment I had is that the soup could have held better on the spoon — meaning that it could be a little thicker by being creamier, and a creamier flavour would compliment the fish taste better too.
Entrée: Crab spaghettini: good crab taste, but could do with a little more meat for a dish at a fine dining restaurant.
Main: Pork belly in a bed of pickled red cabbage: the cabbage tasted great, the pork was juicy… but, the crackling should be a lot more crumbly. Something achieved with more prickling of the skin. I liked the white, almost lemon-​buttery fennel purée — along with the pickled red cabbage they balanced out the fat of the pork belly.
Main: Seafood Bouillabaisse: Tasted alright but… I was expecting a little more wow in a dish at a fine dining restaurant.
Main: Corned beef: wasn’t my favourite to be honest. But I won’t comment much because I don’t exactly consider myself to be a corned beef connoisseur. If this was an «interpretation» of corned beef then I’d probably expect something quite different.
Atmosphere-​wise, it was great but possibly bordering on being quite loud. But that’s not something the restaurant management could fix, perhaps try putting on some jazz music to temper with customer mood as they enter? But I won’t go further because I don’t really know.
Staff attentiveness and friendliness was fantastic.