Crown Perth for a vintage celebration; our Keg & Thistle origin story; say “Crown”, not “The Crown”; checking in, then and now; the great bathroom quandary; High Tea vs High Cheese – cheese, please; ocean vs pool – no contest; singing the casino blues; Oyster Bar EQ diversion; Nobu bento box diversion; review: Rockpool Bar & Grill
Where does a vintage couple like us go to celebrate? – why, Crown of course! This time, it was to mark our 30th anniversary of meeting.
Roy and I met in a bar in Florida Road, Durban, on 25 August 1992. Four years later to the day, he proposed to me in the same bar: the Keg & Thistle, now long gone. And so we make a point of having a drink in a bar every 25 August to celebrate… well… ourselves.
Crown Perth – what’s in a name?
Peculiarly, no one calls it “the Crown”. Crown Perth Casino, the Crown Metropol hotel and all the rest of this sprawling complex is simply called “Crown”… and we’ve been in Perth WA long enough to know that. (Since late February 2020, to be exact. That’s when the pandemic nonsense kicked off in earnest.)
This wasn’t our first stay at Crown Towers. The first was a surprise from Roy for my birthday on 17 January this year (2022). Though I did not know where we were going for the night, I’d been duly briefed it was worth dressing up for. Clever Roy knows better than to drop me into a situation for which I’m sartorially ill-prepared. (For other, more casual inner-city celebration options, see this blog, Or this one.)
But I was most surprised when I found the car taking the Burswood turnoff, which even I knew to associate with Crown Casino. Already, weeks in advance of the official 31 January 2022 restrictions on the un-double-jabbed, the Crown complex had declared itself verboten to social lepers like ourselves.
Checking in – first time round
It must have still been school holidays, because the place was packed and we had to stand in line for half-an-hour to check in. Not exactly five-star, right? The receptionist admitted this half-hour wait was the norm “since Covid”. And no – there was no way around it.
Room 620, a Premier King River View overlooking the Swan River, was beautifully appointed, complete with a luxurious en suite*, a marble table with comfortable chairs, and a chaise longue from which to make the most of the glorious vista.
Now that so many people aspire to having the kind of luxurious bathroom that formerly was only to be found in top-notch hotels, it can be disappointing to pay through the nose for a hotel room that’s nowhere near as comfortable as your own at home – double vanities, bathtub, rain-shower, separate loo etc. Happily, this is not the case at Crown.
Ocean vs Pool
No contest, in my opinion.
As it was mid-summer January, I’d already had my morning jog and dip at our own glorious Burns Beach (above) – the best imaginable start to any day, be it a birthday or not – so I wasn’t particularly anxious to join the heaving throng at the swimming pool.
That said, others have raved about the pool – even going so far as to paying hundreds of dollars for a cabana at the exclusive Enclave. Exact prices on emailed application (why?): see here.
Somewhat slim F&B pickings (back in January 2022)
Hadi, at the TWR (The Waiting Room) bar, recommended the cocktails at High Line, the rooftop bar upstairs from Crown Theatre. But that’s open only from Thursday to Saturday – and I had the poor judgment to have my birthday on a Sunday this year.
What’s more, when we returned this time (August, i.e. late winter), it wasn’t open at all… something vague was said about it opening again “for the summer”. I find it a poor show that a huge and upmarket entertainment complex of this nature has no bar with a view, no live music, and nowhere to dance.
(Speaking of upmarket, is there anything more direly dingy and downmarket than a casino? Even walking through it is depressing. But I suspect that the miserable lot of gamers we saw are the real source of income for casino groups like Crown; the rest of it, meaning the five-star accommodation, the high-end restaurants and the theatre, are mostly window-dressing.)
On that first visit, Roy had booked us into fine dining Italian restaurant Modo Mio, the only restaurant in the entire Crown complex that was open to the un-double-jabbed. (Did I mention that TWR was the sole bar that could/would serve us?)
Modo Mio was excellent – but I don’t seem to have made any notes about what we had, so sorry. However, I do remember being pleased with the standard of the food, and that its well-trained international staff gave it the feel of the kind of five-star service you find in Asia – way beyond what often passes for such in Australia. And that goes for just about everything at Crown.
Checking in this time
This time around, check-in was a breeze. In fact, we cheekily arrived at 1.30pm, well before the stated 3pm check-in time, and were served immediately. Our tenth floor river-view Deluxe King was identical to the room we’d had last time. The $60 upgrade for a Swan River and City view like this is well worth it.
Apart from the views and luxurious comfort, what we like about the accommodation at Crown is that they don’t take the piss* when it comes to mini-bar prices.
(*Roy’s vulgar expression, of course, not mine.)
We were told that La Vie champagne bar would open only at 5pm for its stated and glorious purpose – serving champagne and lesser bubbles. From 2pm to 4.30pm, it was occupied by patrons enjoying High Cheese*.
(*I’ve never been a fan of High Tea. It’s always seemed to me a waste of appetite: neither lunch, nor dinner, but threatening to spoil either one, the other, or both. But when you make it a High Cheese and throw in a G&T, somehow the argument falls away.)
I was supposed to do Crown’s High Cheese with a group of girlfriends just last month. But poor Christa, who had booked the table, sadly came down with the dreaded plague, and most of the others changed their minds for various reasons. As one has to book months in advance for the High Cheese, so who knows when the opportunity will arise again?
It may be time to lighten the mood with a slideshow, so here’s what the stylish Dee and I did instead: lunch at the Oyster Bar at Elizabeth Quay. Isn’t Dee’s coat amazing?
It wasn’t our first lunch at the excellent OB, and it won’t be our last. Cheers, Dee!
Nobu with Debbie, the Eminently Well Prepared
Speaking of girlfriends, my social butterfly friend Debbie recently invited me, along with the lovely Anna and the gorgeous Mandana, to lunch at Crown’s famous Japanese restaurant, Nobu. (She makes a point of booking a table at her favourite restaurants well in advance, several times a year. When the time comes around, there’s generally no shortage of takers.)
Nobu’s delicious bento lunch is amazing value (something like $55 each, including a glass of bubbles). Another bottle of bubbles appeared in due course – courtesy of both Deb and Anna having their birthdays that week – and in the end it was fortunate that no one was driving home.
Dinner at Rockpool
The Rockpool Bar & Grill is a Neil Perry concept, with a couple of other outlets, including ones in Sydney and Melbourne. Perry is an Aussie celebrity chef; and the menu quotes him as saying: “The cornerstone of good cooking is to source the finest produce.”
“The cornerstone of good cooking is to source the finest produce.” Neil Perry
Conveniently located right next to La Vie champagne bar, Crown’s Australian restaurant Rockpool Bar & Grill came highly recommended by son Carl and daughter-in-law Carrie. They’d raved about the tasting menu* with wine-pairing they did a couple of years ago; so, when I booked – a month or so before the time – I enquired and was assured that we could simply order the tasting menu on the night.
(* We said dégustation a few times before realising that we were being far too French and fancy. Here, they call it a tasting menu. They also say homewares, and chaise lounge. No, that’s not a typo.)
Not so! The seasonal truffle tasting menu was no longer available, and the chef was “working on” the next one, which would be launched for the Christmas season. Roy wasn’t having that, and he said so.
Happily, the maître d’ came back with a promise to do a dégustation especially for us, complete with wine pairing. “We’ll give you a five-course tasting of three starters, a steak main and a dessert – the best from our menu,” he vowed.
A brilliant sommelier took over, and all was sweetness and light from then on.
- Our favourite Margaret River méthode champenoise, Vasse Felix’s Idée Fixe, got things off to a jolly start, along with a piece of sourdough and butter.
- Bluefin tuna tartare came delicately seasoned with Davidson plum, kombu and black sesame.
- Then the charcoal Abrolhos Island scallops with Aleppo pepper and orange oil, accompanied by an Austrian Kamptal Grüner Veltliner Terrassen 2021.
- That was followed by Wagin duck liver parfait with orange gel on spiced bread came with an inspired choice of Truchard Chardonnay 2020 from Carneros, Napa Valley.
- Immaculately medium rare, the dry-aged beef fillet from the wood-fired grill was accompanied by béarnaise sauce, piping hot and buttery potato puree, and roasted broccolini on romesco, and served with a glass of Domaine de la Coudette 2020, a Southern Rhone 50/50 blend of grenache and syrah.
- A cheerful Muscadelle came with the delicious and mercifully tiny dessert – something new to the menu, and that I can’t remember well enough to describe with any accuracy. Then a little lava cake appeared, topped with a lighted candle and on a plate bearing the words “Happy Anniversary”.
Bravo, Rockpool!
Here’s a link to Rockpool’s current menu, complete with prices. Our five-course degustation with outstanding wine-pairing came to $500. Service was exemplary, as you’d expect, and the whole experience was a delight from start to finish.
Conclusion
Though it does a lot of things right, Crown could do with some competition to encourage it to up its game a tad. For one thing, it’s well removed from everything else, meaning there isn’t much to do for someone like me who prefers beaches to pools; riverside walks to indoor gyms; shopping to casinos (genuine shopping, like Zara, as opposed to Rolex and Pasquale); lively bars to semi-soul-less lounges; and quirky neighbourhoods with coffee-shops to five-star resort sterility.
I wondered if The Ritz-Carlton, superbly located on Elizabeth Quay, might be a contender. But at double the price of a comparable room at Crown Towers, it really is not. Neither is the more reasonable Doubletree by Hilton, also on Elizabeth Quay, where we stayed for Roy’s 70th birthday celebration last year; read all about it here. Not bad, but still a glorified self-storage option, with far too many intrusive bright lights on smoke-detectors, TVs, smoke alarms and other annoying gadgetry. While location is important, it isn’t everything.
We still have a couple of Crown restaurants to try, including Bistro Guillaume and dinner at Nobu. So no doubt we’ll be back!
[…] though I was better packed for a fancy night at Crown, I never mind being overdressed. (Here’s my blog post about our anniversary celebration at Crown last […]