the absolute worst restaurant experience to date.
my partner and i dined at banksii for the valentine's day 8 course menu. you'd expect that at $149 per head, you'd be served all your dishes on the menu at the very least. upon being seated, we only glanced at the menu before it was quickly taken away from our table, which we initially found rather odd but didn't think any further into. it was only at the end of our meal and having paid for dinner, did we notice the second round of customers enjoying two dishes on the menu that we hadn't received. we’re extremely disappointed that not once throughout the night did any staff bring this to our attention. we requested for the menu not once, but twice, and each time this was unfulfilled.
at the end of the night, we raised to a waiter that we believed we hadn’t been served two dishes. not once was an apology made by himself or the manager. instead, he offered us one complimentary pre-drinks voucher each for future use. we refused this, as we’d rather the dishes be deducted from our bill at this point. we made this very clear, however he made us feel extremely uncomfortable, and strongly pressured us to accept the voucher, repeatedly saying “this is a better deal, it’s worth more than your two dishes, you’ll only receive $8 off your bill otherwise.” we reiterated that the vouchers won't be of use to us as we don't frequent the area, to which he then rudely snatched the vouchers off us and stormed off to the register to reprocess our bill. he came back and without a word unmannerly placed the eftpos machine in front of us, with a grand total deduction of… $4. first of all, at $149 per head, 2 courses on the menu definitely does not equate to $4. secondly, one course is a pre-existing dish on their menu valued at over $10, at the exclusion of their inflated valentine’s day pricing. we requested to speak to the manager who was available on the floor, but she refused to even present herself to us. the waiter’s response to this? - "we've already refunded you $4. we weren't even going to deduct anything from your bill." this is completely appalling and unacceptable. utter dishonest service to advertise 8 courses, only to serve 6 and refuse to even remunerate the difference, let alone offer a single word of apology.
it's a real shame that several tables next to us also only received 6 dishes, but were most likely completely unaware, as they left before the second round of bookings arrived. this only leads us to believe that the removal of the menus from our tables was intentional and very deceitful.
the rest of the service was extremely poor. it took almost 2.5 hours for six courses to trickle out. the food was ordinary to say the very least. a lot of our requests were ignored, water was not refilled and cutlery was placed directly onto our unclean table.
we most definitely will never be coming back or recommending banksii to any friends or family.