Embers Restaurant

PROFILED BY DE GROOTS MEDIA
A comfortable, rather plainly appointed, starched-linen restaurant with a menu perfectly matching the mainly tourist and house-guest clientele: oysters natural or Kilpatrick, a small pizza selection, chicken Caesar, fish and chips, chicken parmigiana, eye fillet and lamb cutlets plus half-shell scallops, a Tasmanian seafood platter and hot-smoked salmon to let diners know they’re in Tasmania. What they do, they do fairly well – a generous slab of salmon perfectly smoked to order, still moist and pink at the centre, and quite delicious dressings on the calamari, octopus and side order of garden salad.

The service is excellent and friendly from menu-literate and well informed staff, while live jazz livens things up and attracts a good local crowd on Friday and Saturday nights. The only real problem comes with the wine list, with only a few entry-level local wines and the others little better than what you see as weekend specials in a suburban bottleshop, at what many might consider unreasonably high prices. But that’s a common problem in hotel restaurants worldwide and, with quite a few of the wines available by the glass, diners can readily match consumption to the depth of their pockets.

Graeme Phillips