Beautiful Bather's Pavillion

For nearly six months I've been looking out my kitchen window at a beautiful 1920's art deco style building known as the Bather's Pavilion. It sits right on Balmoral Beach and houses a kiosk (where the kids can get their babyccinos), a cafe (where we've been known to order a basket of 4 pastries when there's no breakfast food to be found in our place) and a fine dining restaurant (which, before last night, we had never set foot in).

We've recently added a weekly date-night to our schedule. You know, we hire a babysitter and go to restaurants that don't have macaroni and cheese on the menu. It's so refreshing! So last night we decided to walk across the street and see if Bathers lived up to its reputation as one of the best restaurants in Sydney.

We weren't disappointed. Like many fancy restaurants around here, Bathers has a set menu. You select one entree (aka appetizer), one main (aka entree), and a dessert (this term is universal around the world) for a set price. They also bring out a little something before your selections to, I suppose, whet your appetite. Last night it was a teeny tiny thimble sized mug of potato and leek something and an equally teeny tiny spoonful of jewfish something or other. It is very hard to understand Aussies when they are speaking about fancy food. Suffice it to say, everything was delicious!

The restaurant also features a vegetarian and a degustation menu. Since I'm not a vegetarian and I had to google "degustation" I just stuck with the standard menu. Everything we had was amazing. Bather's isn't one of these overrated, over the top type of restaurants. The food was "beautiful", the service superb, the location perfect. All in all it made for a lovely date night. And we didn't have to worry about how to get home.