Let me start by saying that Hotel Son Brull is utterly fabulous...We travel to Pollenca regularly and a visit to the hotel is always on our agenda....the building and decor, gardens, facilities and atmosphere are all incredible and some may say awe inspiring as each view inside and outside of the hotel changes depending on the time of day.......We first visited the hotel when it was literally a building site in 2004 as we were staying in the hotel's then sister hotel in Cala Sant Vicenc and the owners kindly invited us for a nosey!.......I t was really wonderful to see how Son Brull has weathered gracefully and matured since then when we visited for dinner last Wednesday evening. (We haven't stayed at the hotel as our circumstances mean its just a tad out of the way for us......we can't comment therefore on the overall Son Brull experience and this review is purely about our recent dinner experience.)
Given our past knowledge of the hotel, my wife and I were very excited about having dinner at the hotel's restaurant 365....we had checked out this season's menu on the internet before travelling and all sounded very acceptable indeed.......Upon arrival, all was fine with the setting, pre dinner drinks, breads and oils..... the head waiter was very attentive and our table was glorious.....where's this going I hear you say?....My wife ordered the warm chicken salad and I the prawn and aubergine for starter.....we both had the beef and bearnaise sauce for main course.....a bottle of red completed the meal.
It is fairly obvious that the hotel is setting its restaurant up as a fine dining experience....here is where the problem occurs...... in our opinion fine dining is all about creativity, inventiveness, seasoning, sauces, textures and, above all, taste.....non of the above were on show during our last visit.........My wife's starter was akin to a chicken olive you could buy in tescos with a couple of lettuce leafs..... my dish was competently cooked but was tasteless...no seasoning, poor sauce and certainly no creativity.
Main course was exactly the same....I'll explain what was served.......a generous enough fillet of beef competently cooked....unseasoned......2 baby boiled potatoes where the only nod to fine dining was that each had been finely sliced then put back together again......a stalk of spring onion fried in pastry.... the bearnaise was in an accompanying minute dish and I can only assume the chief had run out of key ingredients....tasteless.......That's it......
We skipped on desert , fearing the worse .......Its all about what you choose, we know that, but everything on a fine dining menu should be of a quality much better than what was served to us and much better than what you would expect to get at home or in a standard restaurant.....that's why you pay 200 euros for the pleasure.
If you have dinner at restaurant 365, We do hope the chef has found his seasoning tools and imagination by then!!!
This review is the subjective opinion of a TripAdvisor member and not of TripAdvisor LLC