For the second time running when I checked into the Sofitel Brisbane, something stood out and it wasn’t the multimillion dollar upgrade of their ground floor bar and restaurant. In fact, neither of them stood out at all through either of my stays here. What did stand out though was the clerk that’s checked me in on both of my stays here; Michelle. There is something to be said about efficient and competent professional service and the entire Sofitel front of house staff are, though Michelle was different – she smiled, she was genuinely cheerful and happy to help. The rest of them bordered on clinical; almost as if they were reading from a well rehearsed script and giving out the same vibes that a call centre operator gives when they’ve just had enough for the day and clearly want to get you out of the way as fast as they can so they can go back to their soduku. I can honestly say Michelle was the only front of house staff member I ever saw smile and not only that, everyone I saw walk away after she served them was smiling too. To that point, the concierge service I feel was average, they did make 2 out of 3 restaurant bookings for me (the third was closed so they can’t be faulted) but when I asked some questions requiring local knowledge the service fell sharply. I asked for an arts supply store because I needed a new sketch book; 10 minutes later after they went through the yellow pages I got a call in my room telling me the nearest store was a 30 minutes train ride away in the suburbs. To his benefit he did tell me which train to catch and how to get there, but the nearest arts supply store is just a few blocks away down one of the streets the hotel borders. Why didn't they just goggle it and give me the answer on the spot?

Sofitel Looking from Post Office Square and across Anzac Square

By no means was Michelle from the front desk the only pleasant and friendly staff member at the Sofitel. The staff in the club lounge were excellent, happy and cheerful and even remembered Miles and I when we came back over a month after our first visit. Heck, they even smiled while they cleaned up the plate of scrambled eggs Miles dropped on the floor half asleep one morning. Speaking of the scrambled eggs, the club lounge breakfasts are quite nice in their own right; they have all of the basics, but then, only the basics. Fronting up for breakfast are scrabbled eggs, mushrooms & bacon in the bain-marie and a good selection of fruit, yoghurt, and a few cereals and juices and some pastries; plus champagne on weekends. I’d liked to have seen more but I’m happy with what they provided. I guess if they did have more no one with access to the club lounge would fork out the $30 for the “interactive” breakfast at Thyme² which had everything from eggs benedict to custom made omelettes.

Club Lounge Breakfast at the Sofitel Brisbane

Evening drinks and canapés at the club lounge were much better than the breakfasts, a good selection of cold items, sushi, an antipasti platter, petit fours and some warm items ranging from samosas, spring rolls, curry puffs etc (two different hot items per night, cold items are the same). The hot food again wasn’t anything extraordinary, all from a packet, but I guess the fact that there were free wines, beers and spirits made up for it considering the prices at the Cuvee Bar downstairs. The view on dusk can't be beat too! The club lounge is a perfect way to start an evening and I would highly recommend a visit here.

Lower Level of the Club Lounge


Upper Level of the Club Lounge

As for the $6 million dollar upgrade of the hotel recently; the lobby, restaurant and bar as well as the club lounge were extensively upgraded and a quite nice with clean lines and lots of natural materials, the rooms though need some improvement. Sofitel has a concept called “myBed” which is meant to provide a night sleep that will change your life forever, apparently. I understand what they’re trying to achieve, most beds in Australia have hard and overly firm mattresses, but really what you need is a fairly soft mattress that will conform to your body and support it, the bed I have at home is like that and it’s like sleeping in a warm hug. What I got out of the beds here were sore necks and shoulders and the feeling that all of the mattresses were worn out, less like a hug and more like a school camp.

The corner suite we stayed in on the first visit seemed quite tired despite the new furnishings while the club room I stayed in the second time suffered less; though it could have used thicker walls. The couple in the room next to us seemed to enjoy their room quit a lot. They enjoyed it at 3:00am, again at 3:30, 8:30 and 9. They enjoyed it so much that the bottle of water on MY bedside table fell off.

On the whole I’m disappointed with the Sofitel Brisbane, particularly because the few times I’ve stayed in their Melbourne and Sydney counterparts I’ve never had a problem, the beds were huge and comfortable, the staff were excellent and the food was great and well priced. The Sofitel Brisbane is definitely the poor cousin to their bigger city family. When I head north again in a couple of weeks I think I’ll try the Hilton but I’m worried that like the Sofitel, it’s going to be suffering from it’s hurried Expo ’88 construction and lack of a through refurbishment since. I really am worried that the Sofitel Brisbane may still well be the best on offer. If the Hilton doesn’t prove any better Miles is going to have to start coming down here instead. I’ve got a more comfortable bed, a quieter room and better food at home.

Tags:Sofitel, Club Lounge, Thyme2, Lounge, Bar, Restaurant, Wine, Brisbane, Beef, Breakfast, Hotel

The star rating system for hotels doesn’t tell you how good a hotel is, just what it offers and the Sofitel Brisbane is a 5-Star example of it. As I said, they come down to what a hotel offers, is there a hairdryer in the bathroom? Is there an iron the cupboard? How about a gym and pool? The Sofitel gets its 5-star rating because it’s got more than one restaurant/bar but they only have to have them, they don’t need to be any good.

Let’s start with the Cuvee Bar. Every bar everywhere has an unwritten etiquette to follow and it’s always different but not unreasonable and usually boils down to how the manager of the establishment likes his or her staff to act, and that’s it – it’s a guide for the staff, not the patrons. May be it was me, I made the place look untidy or something, but if a customer wants to order a drink from the bar here, they’re promptly dismissed and told to take a seat before an order will be taken. Even if I try making an order I’m still told to take a seat for the waiter to come and take my order. It’s down right rude and even worse; the wait-staff aren’t very knowledgeable with their drinks unlike the bartender I had questions for who told me to go and sit down. Is your apple martini sour or sweet? Could I get a twist of lime instead of lemon? Would you mind not straining the ice from my cocktail? Every question the wait-staff gets that look puppies do when you poke your tongue out at them. Once they scamper off to ask the bartender, they come back and you have a follow-up question. The routine continues until you give up and say “I’ll just have a gin and tonic then” or your presented with a drink you didn’t want and it takes you a few sips to realise that the inept wait-staff have bought you the another table’s drinks; and their bill!

When you finally get your order, the way you want it, it’ll be easier to pay cash than try and charge the drinks to your room. I know it wasn’t this guys first time charging drinks to a room, he’d served me before, but from my seat you could tell he was struggling.

Thyme² is mainly setup for a buffet or as the Sofitelians like to call it, an ‘interactive experience'. I’ve mentioned before that the breakfasts there are great, for $30, serving you everything you’d want in a breakfast. The dinners seem to be the same. Miles and I didn’t have the buffet dinner when we were there, we did see it though. Couples with children, like seagulls taking turns ferrying overflowing plates of oysters, prawns and everything else they could scavenge back to their offspring. For $80 a head (wine not included) if you’ve got the mentality to eat your monies worth its probably good value but we felt like something smaller, so we went for the ala carte menu.

You can tell head chef Marshall Orton has planned for 90% of his clientelé to take the buffet option; it sure looked like they did. I only saw two other tables out of the full restaurant ordering off the menu and a queue for the seafood. The menu is short and has fairly simple dishes from and nothing you wouldn’t expect to see at a pub with the obligatory pad thai, t-bone with chips, fish (roast snapper) and a tandori chicken. It all seemed fairly pedestrian with only Miles’s meal served with any restaurant flare and by that I mean everything was stacked on top of each other. The current menu can be found on the website.

One nice touch was the appetizer that was served to us, a small ball of duck confit and orange marmalade served on a bed of lettuce. It tasted quite bland an uninteresting, but as it turns out they forgot the orange marmalade on ours. This wasn’t the only thing that was missing from the dishes we were served either. I ended up ordering the t-bone with “a roast tomato ragu and a creamy pepper sauce served with shoestring french fries”. The roast tomato ragu at least had tomato in it but it was just roughly diced fresh tomato in a warmed up pasta sauce – there was no way these tomatoes could have ever seen the inside of an oven; there wasn’t even the slightest hint of caramlisation any good roasted tomato has. The fries seemed to be of the McCain variety, either deep fried at too low a temperature or were left to defrost and get laden with water leaving them soggy. The pepper jus that was served was honestly very nice, rich thick and concentrated with steak, balsamic vinegar and rosemary flavours and would have gone very well with the roasted tomato ragu, if it had had roast tomato in it. Note that I said it was a pepper jus and not a creamy pepper sauce? Guess what was missing. I find it difficult to believe that a restaurant of this size and supposed calibre can deliver very basic dishes so far removed from the menu.

Miles also had the beef. A 120 day grain fed Darling Downs beef filet served with Parisian style butter on green beans and a potato cake. It was well presented, stacked a good six inches high with the same jus that accompanied my steak, minus the pepper, drizzled around the side. The report on it was generally positive, although the potato was a little under done.

To counter balance the average food were some excellent wines, chosen by the Sommelier, Toby Graham, to fill out the wine list. For the main I chose an ‘04 Wantirna Estate Cabernet Sauvignon Merlot (List Price $112, Store Price $60-$70). The wine itself is quite nice and is more complex than you’d expect from just a Cab Sav Merlot, and that’s probably because there’s actually some Cab Franc and Petit Verdot in the bottle too. Overall, the wine has a nice blackcurrant to mulberry flavour with the classic merlot dusty finish. If you’re looking for it in a store, Wantirna Estate is the one with the Michael Leunig cartoons on the labels.

When it came to dessert, I wanted a bottle of something else to go with our Lenôtre Frambrosier’s so I asked Toby for a recommendation. There was the obligatory Noble One, but I thought that the overpowering honey in it would kill the delicate raspberries and cream in the dessert, Toby agreed and recommended the 2005 Grande Maison Semillon Sauvignon Blanc Muscadelle from Monbazillac in France (List Price, $51/375mL, Store price $30/375mL). I found that it had soft hay-like flavour, not grassy at all, it was drier and warm but with a definite floral sweetness that worked well with the dessert.

The Sofitel, being owned by the French Accor group have enlisted, under license, Lenôtre to provide desserts and cakes for its hotels, they look stunning, particularly the signature Frambrosier, which looks like a giant pink lamington topped with fresh raspberries and a raspberry sugar swirl. Within the gayest dessert of all time are layers of sponge cake with a raspberry centre, covered in cream and then a pink coconut (I think it’s pink coconut anyway). Given that it’s a sponge cake with cream and a raspberry centre I was expecting something more like a molleaux which is an individual cake that has a liquid sauce centre that spills out across the plate when you cut into it. The frambrosier certainly had the potential for it. I’m still not sure if what we got was meant to be a molleaux because they were half frozen. The bottom and centre were practically solid with the top had just started to soften. I don’t know if you’ve ever frozen cream but it doesn’t work – large ice crystals form and when you cut into it, it splinters apart. At the very least, these desserts should be served only slightly chilled to show their true potential, and meet their hype.

The highlight of Thyme² has got to be Toby Graham’s wine list and the quite knowledgeable service he provides. Toby has been studying and working with wines for over 15 years and answered all of our questions quickly and with confidence, not only suggesting wines but explaining why he’d suggested them which for mark-ups like these is great because he can help narrow down the choices for you – sure all sommeliers should do this, it’s their job, but Toby does it well.

Tags:Bar, Restaurant, Sofitel, Brisbane