Gungahlin gets a bar. Siren opens.

went there a few weeks ago for dinner. here are some of my observations…

* expensive, small portions as other people have noted. food was ok, but not WOW. I had haloumi and salsa entree and lamb salad for mains. nothing to write home about.
* the tables are very closely packed together, so you feel like you are intruding on their space as they are on yours. It is also very noisy. The chairs arent really comfy either.
* the wallpaper on the back wall, if you sit right in front of it (facing the wall) to face and talk to someone, the wall does this trippy magic eye thing which is very disconcerting and eventually gave me a headache. odd, but notable. the music was also annoying trip-hop type rubbish that suits the decor but annoys the bejessus out of me.
* one of the male bar staff was really cute. always a bonus.

since I dont live in gunners, I wont be going there often, but on first try, it would be nice to have something like it in tuggers but with better food at a better price!!! I guess gungahlin residents are used to paying ridiculous prices for their mc mansions, then they dont mind paying for overpriced drinks and food!

Once we’d eaten our tiny and expensive portions of food, one of my friends asked a waitress if we could do coffee and cake

You went to a bar for coffee and cake?

I despair for the youth of today…

I’m guessing you’ve never been to Tilley’s then Thumper? Expensive there too, but still better value than Siren.

Icepoet said :

My hamburger and rectangular potato slices,around $21……

Crikey….Kinglsey’s is $18 from memory.

SamSam77 said :

Was disappointed with the food. Top prices for small and average meals.

Maybe they are trying to recoup more of the cost of the lease 🙂

As I’ve been told, leasing commercial space is expensive in GG. Spoke to an ex shop owner who claimed the lease for his small Gungahlin town centre space was the same as his shopfront in Braddon (which has at least 2x as much floor space & better visibility). Costs were part of the reason for getting out of there.

unfortunately I didn’t have a great experience there. I think if you were just going for a drink it would be fine. But I went with a group of friends on a saturday night. The tables were so packed in that we had to get up and move to let some people out that were seated behind us. The wait staff could barely get through and they were tiny. Was disappointed with the food. Top prices for small and average meals. It seemed to me that they were trying to be too many things. Be a bar with pub food and pub prices or be a top restaurant. I think they were failing trying to do both. Also I was there 2 weeks ago and still no cake!

Don’t know what it’s like as a bar as such, but a few friends and I went there a couple of weeks ago for lunch. Staff were attentive, but that’s about the best we could say about the place. Food overpriced and very small portions. I always get a bit grumpy with establishments who say that a meal comes with a serve of chips only to find 3 or 4 rectangular slices of potato on the plate (you couldn’t call them chips, that’s for sure). And of all the things to be stingy about, I mean they’re as cheap as…

My hamburger and rectangular potato slices,around $21 – the burger bun wasn’t even toasted and it was no different to a one I’d have down the local park. My friends meals were equally as abysmal.

Once we’d eaten our tiny and expensive portions of food, one of my friends asked a waitress if we could do coffee and cake – we were all set for a good catch up as we hadn’t seen each other for a while. The waitress walked out the back, returned to us in 30 seconds and said they have no cakes or desserts or any kind.

So, we decided to go somewhere else for coffee and cake.

Oh, and as an aside, 3 seperate times staff dropped and smashed plates in the eating area itself. New staff maybe, but 3 times in less than an hour?

Anyway, since we were heading off somewhere else for coffee and cake, suitably hungry from our lack of nourishment in the lousy food we were served, we walked up to the counter to pay for our meals. We were given the total amount, but since we were 4 friends, asked if it would be possible to split the bill instead.

A woman (I’m assuming the owner as she’d been wandering around all day but clearly wasn’t a member of the waitstaff or barwoman/chef), was standing near the young woman at the register. When we asked to split the bill, the young woman looked over at the older woman standing pretty much right next to her and with just the bar itself between her and us, and asked her if it was ok to split the bill. The older woman/owner completely ignored us, looked straight at the staff member and said ‘no’. And that was it.

Not even a ‘I’m very sorry but we don’t do that here’. Just ‘no’, with no acknowledgement or apology to us standing right there. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying we were owed an apology for the fact that they wouldn’t split bills, but if your customer has asked you to make an accomodation for them, you could at least be polite about saying no.

So, we managed to put our money together and had some lovely coffee’s and cake over at the main strip in gungahlin instead. And every person who has come and asked us what the place is like, gets the same answer, ‘don’t waste your time’. Rip off food prices, rude people. Might be a great place to have a greek wedding with all the place smashing going on though.

Excellent, an entertainment option close to home thats not a club. Not sure why it took so long considering Gungahlin has been around for 20 years, but it’s a start. Here’s to seeing a few more open soon.

Goodbye Prozac, hello alcohol. Living in Gungahlin just gets better and better!

The bar has a nice look and fitout, dropped by last night but one of these fancy invite only events was on. Girls with extremely short skirts and funky fresh hair-do’s gave it away as I approached.

In any event, the phone number for the place is 6162 0377.

If he’s a Gaul, shouldn’t his name be Danielix?