Where - 701 Swanston St. Carlton
Price - $25.00
Website - www.rydges.com/
Reviewers - Lee & Nikki
I think this marks a first for ParmaDaze as it’s the first time that we have reviewed a hotel. Not a hotel in the way that the Birmingham Hotel is a Hotel, but a proper hotel. With beds and showers and stuff.
Rydges fell onto our radar when our good friends The Happiest Hour tweeted this…
It’s cut off by the Twitter photo box, but Rydges are offering a happy hour of Furphy pints for $6 from 4:30-7:30 every day. Now I’m not the biggest fan of Furphy, but $6 pints are a fantastic deal. I went onto the Rydges website, found a menu and confirmed that they do indeed serve a parma.
Now there is another, personal reason why my interest was piqued by the Rydges on Swanston parma - back in 2012 Reviewer Nikki and myself got married there. Ceremony on the rooftop, reception in the function room and pre-wedding beers in the very bar we were returning too for a parma review, so as well as heading out for a Thursday feed this review served as a bit of a trip down memory lane.
Now here’s the interesting bit - There was no parma at Rydges when we got married there. Definitely not, as if they did our 120 guests would not have had alternating drops of pork belly or salmon filet but parmas all around. But that has only served to highlight some changes to the Rydges on Swanston menu that I’ll get to shortly.
We arrived at the lobby bar. If you’ve ever been to a hotel lobby bar you’ll know what to expect. It’s a hotel bar, it’s adequate. I grabbed a cheap pint of Furphy and looked around, other than the stools running along the window and some tables out on the outdoor deck there wasn’t much available in the way of dining space. It was decked out more as a bar and lounge than anywhere you would tuck into a parma, however I went for a walk and noticed that the once fine dining restaurant in the next room was now unmanned. Seat yourself with a sign asking to “order at the bar”. Okay, I guess this is where they are running the pub meals now! We grabbed a booth and checked the menu
Easy done, we placed our order at the bar as requested.
It was a weird vibe. Ordering a pub feed in the bones of what was once a lovely restaurant. It sounds harsh but it gave me the vibe that Rydges had sort of given up when it came to their dining options. If they had table service it might have felt a bit more “normal” but having to walk to the next room to order at the bar felt like they were one step short of giving me a buzzer to go collect our meals from the kitchen window.
As far as beers on tap go options were pretty limited. Furphy, James Squire 150 Lashes and … another beer that I can’t remember. To be honest they had me at $6 pints of Furphy.
About 20 minutes after ordering the parmas arrived at the table.
Now let me preface the following by saying that the parma itself was the worst thing on the plate, so there is a lot of positivity coming, we just have to push through this bit to get to it.
The Rydges parma makes me sad because I can see potential for it to be great. The chicken schnitzel was big, crazy thick and quality chicken breast. But it was cold … and dry. The crumbing was mostly fine but got quite thick in places. There’s a world where this parma was served to us piping hot and I am singing its praises, but unfortunately it missed the mark for me this week. Its not like it was inedible or anything, It was perfectly edible … just a missed opportunity for something great.
The top of the parma was quite oily, I believe the oil had separated out of the cheese a little. But the cheese was gooey and flavoursome. The napoli was unremarkable but fine, and there was at least a slice of ham, although it didn’t add a whole lot to the flavour of the parma.
All up it has the potential to be a great parma, but a couple of issues in the kitchen lowered it from “great” to just “okay”.
Okay now this is where things get better because the sides for the Rydges parma were absolutely outstanding. The hefty serve of beer battered chips were well salted and even arrived with a pot of tomato sauce for chip do-page without prompting. Unlike the parma they were served piping hot and fresh. A fine side to the dish.
If we had not just come off a perfect 10 salad last weekend I’d say this was the best salad we’ve had all year. A massive bowl, engulfing the plate. Packed high with fresh lettuce, onion, capsicum, cucumber, grated carrot and drenched in balsamic dressing. Absolutely delicious and everything I want in a garden salad
“The chips and salad were great but the parma was a bit of a let down. A bit cold and dry. ”
Value is a tough one to judge this week. Its hard to fault the quality of ingredients used by Rydges for their parma, but at the same time I don’t think I got $25 worth of enjoyment out of a so/so parma and some fantastic sides. On Thursdays Rydges offer a $15 lunch parma - That sounds like a much better value proposition to me. Maybe worth a try at that price otherwise I wouldn’t be rushing out to try it.
If you get really sleepy after you eat a parma and need to lie down on a hotel room bed immediately after consumption then you could definitely do worse than Rydges. Hotels these days usually share the menu downstairs with their room service options so getting this parma delivered to your hotel room wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world. A couple of tweaks and it could be great however our experience faltered where it mattered most so I struggle to recommend it. Maybe try it if you are staying in the hotel, otherwise I wouldn’t travel too far to try it.