Stillwater | Launceston

Stillwater was another cafe circled on our itinerary. We imagined ourselves spending hours dining on great food while enjoying the view of the Tamar River. This is what we came to expect after reading the mountains of reviews online, each boasting about the food, service and scenery. Well let's just say that we agree that it is a beautiful view.

As always, we started off with refreshing drinks and in this case, Matt's all time favourite, Strange Love was available. This was a welcomed start to the meal which soon dragged out to be a long meal. We had allocated 2 hours to dine here in order to maintain our itinerary. Given it was a late lunch on a weekday we thought this should be plenty of time. The meals were brought out very slowly, in fact we ended up being 1 hour behind schedule when we left.

Selection of cured meats

The selection of cured meats came served with onion and that was all. There was no bread to accompany the meat, or olives to cleanse the palette. We found ourselves taking bread and cheese from our other entree just to have a change of taste. The flavours of the cured meat was definitely enjoyable, but the board was definitely lacking substance and after a couple of bites it became a little too intense.

Selection of pâté, terrine, cheese, pickles & bread

The pate board was brought out and we were excited to say the least. Cheese, pate and pickles make for a great combination and we couldn't wait to dig in. The pate was different to what we were expecting and it didn't resonate well with us. The texture was off putting so we decided to leave half behind. We did however polish off the cheese, but that could have purely been a result of the previous entree. The taste of pate was different, so this was definitely an opportunity for our taste buds to explore.

Moulting Bay Oyster

We were contemplating on skipping on oysters as Matt is widely known by everyone to be 100% against the kind. Thankfully Stillwater had the option of a single oyster which we opted for. The presentation was beautiful and elegant as it sit on top a bed of rocks. More importantly it was fresh and had a nice extra zing from the yuzu and red onion. Really simple and yet we wish now that we had ordered more.

Jerk spiced chicken breast

Chicken breast is our least favourite thing to order on a menu, even though we love chicken. The risk of receiving an overcooked piece of chicken breast that s dry is so high.. we did however think that of all places, Stillwater should be able to deliver a great piece of chicken. The chicken was overcooked and needed some sauce to compensate and bring the dish together. The presentation was in similar beautiful though.

Duck Laksa

We should have been more skeptical and ask why a contemporary Tasmanian cuisine restaurant will have Laksa on the menu. But we were feeling in the mood for Laksa and wasn't expecting the traditional punchy flavours. We were however hoping it would taste somewhat similar, except almost everything tasted like coconut with lots of lemon juice. This was more like a duck curry than a duck laksa.