Mum's 50th birthday meant a visit to the tallest building in Wales and it's 28th floor restaurant, Grape & Olive.
The Meridian Tower itself is impressive, standing out in the Swansea skyline like a beacon and beckoning you over to see what's what. First thing you'll notice is there is no car park, you have to pay to park in the civic centre car park (which isn't free until after 9pm) and walk the five minutes back to Grape & Olive's separate entrance. Unless you fancy taking the stairs, which you can't as they're for residents and emergencies only, you'll have to squeeze yourself into the very narrow lift and fly up to the 28th floor.
Arriving on the 28th floor, you leave the lift and walk into a very well lit hallway, before returning to a dark and dingy restaurant. Now, don't get me wrong, it's a nice restaurant, but a bit of light wouldn't hurt. We were shown to our bat cave, sorry, table, overlooking...well pitch darkness. I wouldn't reccomend visiting for the view on a winter's evening! Unlike every other table in the place, we had no light above our table for six, just one measly tealight attempting to make it easier for us to read our menus. It did not. My gran asked if they could turn up the lights so we could see...the reply? 'Ummmmm...not really. Maybe I could get some more tealights though....' (they did breifly turn the lights up to let us read well enough to order, turning it straight back down the minute our menus were removed from our hands).
Another thing to mention is the acoustics of the place. With wall to floor glass it is very, very echoy and when there's numerous large groups around, very loud. Which is how my Archers and lemonade ended up as just lemonade. It's also quite cold, another thanks to the glass there.
Orders placed, we sat and waited for our starters. Out of the six of us, only three of us ordered a starter and well, they took forever to arrive. My brother went and moved his car to a more secure car park and arrived back just as the starters went on the table. A good half hour after we'd ordered them. The boyfriend and I had pan fried chorizo with scallops. Good, but needed some sort of sauce to add a bit more flavour. Dad had mushroom bruschetta and had no complaints.
Then came the 20 minute wait for our mains. When they eventually arrived, we tucked in. Or tried to. Due to the lack of steak knife, mum struggled to cut her very tough veal. Brother had a lot of fat on his rib eye steak. Gran, dad and boyfriend had few complaints. As for mine...well, when I order a seafood pasta, I expect well...seafood. I counted 4 scallops and 3 prawns. Not impressed at all. It tasted very lemony which was off putting and I just completely gave up with eating it. It looked like I hadn't even made a dent in it. Not good. In all fairness to the waiter, he listened to our complaints and took both my pasta and mum's veal off our bill as a goodwill gesture.
Two raspberry sorberts and a vanilla ice cream were ordered for dessert and compared to the rest of the meal, arrived very quickly indeed. Then came the bill, which even with the two meals taken off and my brother's 15% Brains discount, was still quite hefty.
All in all, an average night. It's a nice place, but they need to get their menu sorted and it'll be top notch. I'd go again, but I definitely wouldn't have the seafood pasta! read more