visited the grove with my work team recently, to celebrate a colleague leaving the team to move to canada, and another in the team who recently had their 70th birthday.
the building is lovely - i'm not sure if its a scheduled heritage building, but they've definitely done a great job of restoring and protecting the building, maintaining its near-original charm. even with the old window panes, you could hardly hear the noise outside on albert street as they construct the crl - the background music drowns this out (at an appropriate volume). there was some slight vibration every now and then.
i had the wagyu hanger steak w glazed short rib, beetroot & cherries. it was nice; it looks really small when plated, but was actually portioned just right - was quite full afterwards. they have a good wine selection.
the bathroom is very upper class, and they even have individually folded towels for your convenience.
the real stinger here came as we were to leave the restaurant at the end, and is the main reason why i have awarded the score as i have (otherwise would have awarded at least a 4.5). my colleague and i both asked whether we could redeem our entertainment book (eb) vouchers on the meal - they have a 25% off the total bill, and when 4 or more people are dining, you can use at least two vouchers (for a total of $80 discount). the owner said "oh i'm sorry, we don't accept that here" and then proceeded to laugh and say he was joking. very awkward. he then redeemed the vouchers on both of our phones. he then looked at the bill on the computer and said, "oh actually, you can't use them, because you didn't have the degustation".
eb doesn't say anything about degustation - it refers to total bill. however the owner continued to try and claim that it says that in the book (which we obviously could not check as we were using the digital versions). he said out of 'goodwill' he would deduct $40 from the bill, which we just accepted at this stage so we could leave.
if he 'thought' you could only use on the degustation - then how come he didn't say this to start with? he was the one who seated us, asked us what we were having (we'd already phoned and asked in advance about having a la carte). we were one of only three seated tables in the restaurant (and the largest at that). he clearly doesn't know much about the people booking and dining at his restaurant.
i contacted eb afterwards to report what had happened; they apologised and said that they were disappointed, and would be going out to the grove to 'educate' them on what the deal was that they had subscribed to offering customers. supposedly previous years had been degustation only, but it was now 25% off price of bill. how the owner didn't realise this (given i am sure he was involved in putting the restaurant in the eb each and every year).... the eb sent us a card and a nice bottle of red as an apology, so that was lovely on their behalf, however the grove didn't even send us an apology email after we had copied them into our correspondence with eb; so certainly not going to correct their score on those grounds. very snobby in my opinion, and definitely won't be going back.