Beach House Bar & Grill, Westfield Chermside, Chermside, Brisbane

January 05, 2016

The Beach House has always been one of the go to places when you're in the CBD and wanting a simple but casual dining place to have a beer or pub food while listening to live music. Although it could get loud at times especially on friday nights, it would always be quite packed. Now that they've opened at Westfield Chermside, it allows people living around the area to try and dine the same or even a better experience.

A new feel, much more modern but still keeping its casual ambience when compared to the city restaurant. Beach House has always been a more of a self service restaurant meaning that there is no table service. You order at the counter, get given a buzzer then when the buzzer vibrates, you would have to pick up your own food at the counter. Usually this can get confusing when there are similar or the same food on the counter meaning that they may be other diners' food and not yours. It is sometimes hard though to get the attention of the waiters because even if they were not as busy, let's say walking around or standing around the bar as they seem to be nowhere near and the person at the counter would be busy taking orders. It is quite hard when you don't get any advice on which were your meals or her or his meals so you would just have to go with your feeling and hope that the food you're taking off the table is yours.

Lunch specials of $9.90 dishes offers a few various choices you may choose. This was their 'Rump & chips and salad' with any sauce of your choice. The fries were beer battered which was crispy and fried well, the salad is just a simple garden salad with a mixture of greens, shredded carrots, tomato and cucumber. The salad looked fresh but was bland due to the lack of sauce.

The steak was cooked well to our liking, the pepper sauce however though was not as strong as I thought it would be, there were bits of peppercorn but they were just very light in terms of texture but overall, it is a pub meal and it wasn't too bad.

'Chicken Parmigiana & chips and salad' seemed to have been done in a rush or so as the plate was kind of all over the place when we were picking it up from the counter. Again, beer battered fries and garden salad was the same as above however there was more sauce on the salad than before.

As for the chicken itself, I was quite dissapointed.. It was very small as you can see in portion, it seemed like the biggest chip would be its size. A slab of cheese and ham on top along with a tomato based sauce or napoli sauce as it may be, did not make it any better. The tomato sauce based didn't seem to have much seasoning whilst some of the chicken breast seemed to have some burnt areas along the edges.

As you can see, the chicken breast was very thin and although the crumb was thin, the whole dish just didn't do it for me overall.

I quite enjoyed the interior of the restaurant, it has been designed well giving it a homey but also beach side feeling with bits of pieces of the things you could find at the side of the beach and also the artificial greens in the pots just gave the whole wall a bright new light and a nice view while eating.