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Felix is a French restaurant which is part of the Merivale stable, situated in the laneway at the back of Ivy.
This was my first visit to Felix for a couple of years and I made the rookie mistake of not checking their website in advance.
My prior experience was that it was decent food but certainly not one of Sydney’s best restaurants so I was pretty shocked when I opened the menu to find that the mains were hovering around the $50 mark.
The website describes it as “honest, simple food”, a description which I’d say is accurate. But at these prices I expect something much more than that.
For the entree I ordered balmain bugs with marie rose sauce. The one bug arrived on a bed of ice with some cocktail sauce. The fact the plate was covered in ice meant there was nowhere to cut the bug meat which made it quite difficult to eat.
The bug itself was bordering on frozen. The cynic in me wondered whether they hadn’t actually properly thawed what was obviously frozen seafood properly and hoped diners would assume it was so cold from sitting on ice. Overall very bland and disappointing.
My friend rated his pea and crab salad much higher. Not the most obvious combination but it seemed to work.
My friend gave his duck cassoulet main the thumbs up but the serving size was pretty small and hard to see how it justified the $46 price.
My go to dish at French restaurants is steak frites, but at $67 it was way more than I wanted to pay for a mid week dinner so I went for the spatchcock which at $38 was the cheapest non vegetarian main on the menu. The spatchcock was a whole grilled bird with a cabbage and walnut salad. I’d describe it as inoffensive, cooked well but not a lot of flavour.
At these prices I’d expect the food to blow me away and that was definitely not the case.
Similarly the wine was OK but at $60 for a 400 ml carafe (which was one of the cheapest wines on the menu) I would have expected better.
As a lot of reviewers on Trip Advisor have noted the restaurant is very noisy which makes conversation difficult. I would also agree with a lot of reviewers that the bathrooms which are situated in a corridor outside the restaurant are something like what you’d expect to find in a (not well maintained) shopping centre rather than a fine dining restaurant.
Overall a pretty disappointing experience, I expected much better from an outfit as experienced as Merivale. There are plenty of restaurants in Sydney serving this quality of food at much better prices, so I won’t be back.