Post #376752 by pariartspaul on Mon, Apr 28, 2008 10:58 AM

Sorry you all, I have a scathing review of the Tonga Room:

I treated us to the Fairmont’s Tonga Room last Friday night and it wasn’t pretty. Here’s a Polynesian restaurant with no tropical music, (actually no music at all until the dreadful house band began at 9), no tropical foliage, and the worse food I’ve had for years at incredibly outrageous prices. We felt totally ripped off and shocked the Fairmont could run a place like this.

We’d heard it had been recently undergone a huge renovation. All I can say is it must have looked really awful before. It looks like they cleaned it down to bare bones functionality and then just stopped there. I felt like I was sitting in a stripped Polynesian village set. It is definitely an impressive room, but it feels really somber and dead. The rectangular pool in the middle of the room looked freshly white-plastered but there was no attempt to make it look like a lagoon. The main part of the high ceiling had been freshly painted black, and all the water pipes and other things were in plain view. Boy, a couple of nice big palm trees would have helped it a lot.

Anyway, the drinks were decent. We tried a banana Chi-Chi and a Hurricane. Then we ordered the pupu platter and everything on it actually was quite good. We should have stopped there.

For the dinner, we were intrigued by the tempura style lobster on the menu, but the waiter shook his head in horror when we asked about it. We asked him to recommend something and he recommended the beef fillets. Well, did you ever buy a box of those frozen beef fillets at Wal-Mart or Smart and Final and then promised yourself you’d never do THAT again?? That’s what they gave us. It tasted just like thick cardboard simmered in water. Okay, okay, if I was paying $5 for it I might not be surprised, but $35 each at the Fairmont?! Forget it. For the side dish, it was some kind of mixed rice for $7 a piece. It was nasty. It was fishy tasting thawed out baby shrimp mixed in several kinds of boiled rice. It tasted like one of my cooking mistakes. I couldn’t eat it.

We ordered a crème Brule for dessert, and it tasted like a box-mix butterscotch pudding. The waiter brought us a complimentary second dessert for some reason and it looked really cute. It was a flaming marshmallow volcano thing and he said it had raspberry mouse inside. Not. It was nasty. Right about then we saw the little band gathering to begin, so we thought that would be nice. They got on the little boat in the pool and it traveled out to the center. Then they started… oh my god. You’d think maybe they’d be playing some Hawaiian music, but no. It sounded like lounge lizard amateur night in hell, with songs right out of a white-trash wedding. The only way I could imagine listening to these guys play is…. if I was forced to. It was the last straw. We bolted.

I would not return to the Tonga Room unless they totally get new management and a new kitchen. I spend $250 on that crappy dinner for two. I don’t mind splurging on an expensive meal if I feel I’m getting something for my money, but I really felt ripped off by the whole Tonga Room evening.

The most shocking part of all of this is that the Fairmont itself is such a fabulous hotel. We actually stayed there on Friday night, in a beautiful corner room in the old section of the hotel. But the Tonga Room experience kind of tainted the hotel’s reputation for us.

My god, they’ve got a fantastic old place in the Tonga Room, but it’s a shame about how they run it. It needs Hawaiian music, a good decorator, and good food. It actually wouldn’t be that hard to make it fabulous again.

Write the Fairmont if you've been ripped off too. Maybe it was just a bad night, but I don't think so.

[ Edited by: pariartspaul 2008-04-28 11:03 ]