The Sheraton Perth has been without a flagship restaurant for the past six months after the hotel group bit the bullet on a massive refurbishment of its food and beverage facilities.
Its fine dining restaurant, Origins, was closed to make way for temporary dining facilities for the hotel’s guests while its main restaurant, Monterey’s Brasserie, underwent a substantial renovation.
Monterey’s will re-open with a much more modern look on Monday July 30, while Origins Restaurant will re-open on Thursday August 2.
Hoping to elevate Monterey’s food status is the hotel’s new food and beverage manager, Matthew Forsyth.
He’s taking Monterey’s buffet up some significant notches with a range of fine cuisine, which will change daily.
“We are certainly pitching it at the top end,” Mr Forsyth said.
Priced at $45 per adult, the buffet is more expensive than many of its hotel counterparts, but Mr Forsyth said the pricing represented the quality of its food offering.
“I’m trying to get away from that perception that a buffet is stale,” he said.
There will be a dedicated cooking station during each service so guests can have their pasta cooked al dente, as well as other options being cooked before their eyes.
Mr Forsyth worked for The Sheraton hotel group in Sydney before heading west to indulge in his passion for wine.
He did a vintage with Xanadu Wines before taking up a food and beverage role at Quay West Bunker Bay, then moved to Perth to run the operations of Belgian Beer Café.
“It’s a great pub and I had been working for five-star hotels for about seven or eight years, so it was great to do something really different,” Mr Forsyth said.
He said he took on the F&B role at The Sheraton because he had enjoyed working for the company in the past.
And while there has been no restaurant to operate since Mr Forsyth started on May 28, he has still found the job hectic.
“We do a lot of conferences and when I came in we had some pretty massive ones come through, so I really hit the ground running,” he told Business Class.
Mr Forsyth has also designed a new menu for Origins, which includes a filet mignon of butter field beef with chestnut ravioli, field mushroom and twice cooked duck leg a l’orange on savoy cabbage, swede potato gratin and gastrique orange sauce.
