Railway Club Hotel, Port Melbourne by Bureaucrat

For Mr Strong's birthday, Beaker and I took the family to dinner at Railway Club Hotel in Port Melbourne. I nominated the RCH as the place for dinner based on its number one status as the best steakhouse on Urbanspoon.


The restauarant is separated from the rest of the pub, so you don't get the riff raff from the pub-goers and the noise associated with them.


Inside, RCH looks like a typical pub that you would find in a middle class suburb - clean, neat and slightly outdated furniture.


Pick a steak, any steak


For our starter, we ordered a main serve of salt and pepper calamari to share among five adults and one child. Very fresh and tender calamari - we definitely recommend you trying dish. It came served with a shaved fennel and rocket salad and thick cut chips w homemade mayo. Delish. We also got two serves of garlic bread, but that wasn't anything exceptional - a regular French stick smeared with margarine and some garlic.


For mains, Bubba Chuck got the kids' fish and chips. A fresh piece of white fish, which was lightly breaded and pan fried.


Mr Strong and Mother Hen ordered the 800g Cape Grim Rib Eye for two. This came with sauteed pancetta and peas, red wine jus...


...onion rings and roasted field mushrooms. This was great value and very tasty. I especially liked the onion rings. Despite help from the rest of us, we only managed to eat about 95% of this dish.


Beaker went for one of the specials - 250g eye fillet served with eggplant croquettes and caponata. Beaker liked her dish and I quite liked the croquettes - eggplant is such an underrated veg.


Mr P got the 250g scotch fillet w mushroom sauce, which came served with them thick cut chips.


While I went for the eye fillet w red wine sauce. Lovely, tender and flavoursome steak. It was almost perfectly cooked - I had asked for medium to well done, which most of it was, but it was a bit too pink in the middle for me.


We also ordered a large garden salad in an attempt to offset all the rich, protein consumption. The salad was an absolute outrage. A bowl of iceberg lettuce, a token slice of tomato and cucumber, with a drizzle of a commercial light and tangy salad dressing for $11. Frackin' hell - we weren't impressed with this dish!

Verdict
Food - 8.5 (I would have made it 9, but the ho hum garlic bread and that ridiculous salad brought the mark down)
Service - 7
Ambience - 7
Price - 8

Overall
I think we were all pretty happy with the food at RCH. I reckon RCH deserves its status as the number one steakhouse in Melbourne. Although there were a mix of diners, RCH seemed quite popular among the white-haired generation.

The only negatives were the outrageous $11 salad and the fact that they didn't turn on all the aircon until about 7pm. I'm all for saving energy and being green, but when it's a humid, 30+degree day, you turn all the aircon that you got.

Although our starters came out quickly, there was quite a lag (about 30 minutes) for the mains to be served. If we hadn't had the starters, we would have been very hungry and grumpy. However, from what we could see, the food came out at a reasonable time for the diners around us.

Address
Railway Club Hotel
107 Raglan St
Port Melbourne 3207
Telephone: 03 9645 1661