Not Recommended: Boathouse by English Bay

This is the Boathouse located next to the English Bay beach on Beach Avenue.

After a recommendation from my coworker, I decided to come out here for lunch on a sunny day. My friend and I were seated out on their covered patio by the window. The view was nice, but that was the only pleasant thing during our meal. To start off with, the servers there are not happy to help you out at all and stand around talking to each other while playing music on the stereo. When they took our orders, they weren't much of a help either. We ended up ordering a calamari to share, fish and chips with cod, and their special seafood grill.

The service was just.. bad. Our server left after finishing her shift (not that she was very good at her job anyways) and then someone else came by to tell us they would be helping us out for the rest of the meal. The entire time he talked to us, he had these ridiculous shades on (rainbow semi-rimless shades that looked like they were from a snowboarder back in the 80's). I found it extremely rude to have shades on while talking to a customer. I know it's sunny, but that's just disrespectful. I don't know what the policy is there, maybe they're allowed to wear them while working on the patio area. He did not come by to ask about our food until 3/4 into our main.

The calamari was terrible. It was tasteless, just warm, and not crunchy. The batter did not stick to the calamari at all. What looked like a lot of herbs on it did not help. They dumped in diced onions too.. don't know why cause it did nothing to add for taste. Definitely not worth the 13 dollars I paid. My friend's fish and chips were decent, but definitely nothing special, they have better fish and chips served in Lonsdale Quay in a little shop over this known restaurant. Not worth 20 dollars for two pieces of fish and fries and salad. Worst of all was my seafood grill which is their "specialty plate". The dish is like 16 or 17 dollars, and I expected my portions since it says grill. Nowhere in the menu does it say skewer, but what I got was a skewer of two bite sized over cooked salmon, one piece of scallop, and one prawn on top of a handful of undercooked veggies. I was appalled and I let the server know when he finally wandered over from talking to his coworkers.

At least the server did the decent thing and took my "grill" off the bill. I will DEFINITELY not be back will not recommend it to anyone else.