My husband and I wanted to celebrate our anniversary somewhere nice and decided to go for a lunch instead of dinner. When choosing restaurant we were surprised that Annona did not have any recent reviews on Yelp. Despite this we decided to try Annona since it has a pretty good rating.
We showed up at the restaurant and were quickly seated by the hostess. After ordering we asked the server for the washrooms. He explained where the washrooms were and I went off to wash my hands before lunch. Now here's the kink, the washrooms turned out to be quite far away from the restaurant. You had to go out and way down the hotel corridor and then climb a flight of stairs. This is fine for us who are younge but I heard some older ladies who were in the washroom complain about needing a chair to rest after the little trek. So this is maybe something the restaurant should think of. Next my husband went off to the washrooms and came back with a big wet stain on his pants. Apparently the soap dispenser had malfunctioned and squirted out soap right on his pants. It looked as if he had a little accident.
Back at the table we were served a bread plate. This is when I realised that my napkin was missing and it took a little while before I got hold of one of the servers to ask for one. The bread plate was served with warm bread stuffed with some cheese and olive filling as well as crisp bread. However, the stuffing was way way too salty that we immediately had to ask for refill of our water glasses. We just stopped eating the stuffed bread. The crisp bread had been placed next to the warm bread and consequently lost its crispness and became soggy. Big disappointment!
Our starters arrived and I was disappointed to see that my salad consisted mainly of lettuce (like 99.9% of it) and a total of ONE cocktail tomato (not pickled) the size of a quarter plus one tiny little quail egg. No shaved cheese on top. My though was: that's it? For being a fine restaurant at a high end hotel I expected more. I'm sure they could afford to add on a few more cocktail tomatoes. Besides on the menu it actually says pickled tricolored tomatoes, quail eggs (plural) and shaved manchego cheese - this was obviously false advertising. To top things off, the dressing the salad was served with was bland and lacked acidity so it did not help the disappointing salad. My husband's crabcake was on the contrary surprisingly tasty.
Next our mains arrived. I had ordered the chicken with risotto and my husband ordered the lamb. The lamb was perfectly cooked and had some parsley caper mix on top. Unfortunately as with other things today this was oversalted. My risotto had some strong cheese and unfortunately it took over the flavour completely that I couldn't even taste the chicken. The chicken was also very dry which did not improve our impression.
Next we got our desserts. We went for the mascarpone tart with mango coulis and the creme caramel. The caramel dessert was extremely sweet. The tart was good but I think it would have been more refreshing if the mint had been mixed into the coulis.
In summary there were many things that went wrong with today's lunch. From malfunctioning soap dispensers to oversalted food. I'm hoping that this was a rare event and that the chef just had a bad day. Nontheless, based on our experience today I will not be recommending friends and family to go to Annona. I wanted to rate the food alone 1 star but the friendly staff and nice service upgraded Annona to 2 stars.