Review of Chateau Yering Hotel 5*

HIGH TEA DISAPPOINTMENT — My sisters and I wanted to surprise our mum with a gorgeous high tea for her birthday. We knew she appreciated good food and loved the concept of high tea. We also knew of how much she raved about the high tea at the Windsor in the city and also at Coombe Yarra Valley. Keeping this in mind, we still wanted to find that high tea that made her go ‘wow’. We had a selection of a few places to go in the Yarra Valley and decided to go with Chateau Yering due to its great reviews online. We arrived, and thought what a beautiful start to the afternoon; walking into the lovely old building and admiring the old decor. It gave off a vintage fine dining vibe. But how wrong we were. We were seated in the middle of the room. It was just us and another table of six, every other table was empty which seemed a little odd. We were all offered a glass of French champagne. The waitress that was looking after us seemed inexperienced and was fumbling, spilt water on herself and couldn’t hold the plates of food very well, she was just really awkward. But we didn’t care too much as we all have to start somewhere and it could have been her first day on the job for all we knew. For the amount of money we paid per head, the food was unfortunately very average. Both types of Sandwiches provided to us were stale and bland, the pies were actually somewhat tasty but borderline warm and not hot at all. There were prawn skewers for each of us. The prawns were dry, cold, rubbery and honestly, extremely disappointing. It’s like they had been sitting on the bench for five days. Once we finished the savory food, we had another glass of champagne. The sweets presented to us were nice, but nothing special. We ate most of our scones and sweets fairly quickly and as we got to the end and some of us even kept our scones aside to have with our tea and coffee. We waited a little while but the tea and coffee never came out, despite it being a “high tea”. We had to ask for it. The lady who took our tea and coffee order seemed like she didn’t want to be there. The English breakfast teas we ordered were served in your standard coffee cups, despite the table next to us having their tea served in beautiful white and blue bone china tea cups. It was just a really disappointing afternoon. The overall service wasn’t great. We left feeling as though it was a waste of money and unfortunately won’t be recommending Chateau Yering to our family and friends.