The River Grill - Malacca

The food was delicious and the staff is helpful and friendly.

Great location for dating and meets friends.. dating spot i would say.. near river..

Nice ambience by the river. A usual goto restaurant pre pandemics. On this occasion, all onsite eateries of this hotel were closed, except the River Cafe. Alas, the Nyonya Seafood Laksa served with rancid calamari rings I assume those were calamari) as the flesh was utterly slimy. The prawns were too stingingly fishy. The lamb shank that we ordered, hard like a rock. The next day, we both have diarrhea. Yukky.

The food and service was great Please keep use fresh meat because that is make your food great

I can't believe this is a 5 star hotel because their standard of service is anything but. When we made the reservation over the phone, we requested a table inside (i.e. the River Grill section and were told that was fine. Upon arrival, they seated us outside at the River Cafe section. It later transpired that under their current SOP, the River Grill is only open for private events. This was not mentioned to us over the phone nor is it stated on their public website. They didn't even say anything upon arrival and instead just pointed us outside to a table that had not even been set. They kept switching the fans off outside as they were taking pictures for their social media. We had to ask them to turn the fans back on given how warm it was. They got one order wrong and when notified, looked quite puzzled before reluctantly bringing it away. It was like they did not know what to do with the dish. No apologies for their mistake. Food was mediocre at best and very salty (evident from the pizza, pasta and fries . There was also lack of communication between staff. At the car park, we were told by the guy to pay/redeem our parking ticket at the restaurant when settling our bill. When we tried to do this, staff at the restaurant looked confused and said we would have to go all the way to the front desk to do this. My elderly parent went to the bathroom but it was locked. He asked staff for help but no one could show him where an unlocked toilet was for some reason. One of us had to look around for another one (which was far away from the cafe . Our bill had an item we did not order so when we pointed this out, again there was a look of confusion. We were eventually told that the dish on the bill was the same price as a pasta dish we had ordered and because their system did not have that pasta dish to input (which is strange because the pasta dish is definitely on the menu they usually use that dish for bills. They should be trained to explain this to customers when they hand the bill over. While the staff were not rude, they clearly lack the level of hospitality training required of a 5 star hotel. The food has gone downhill, we would have gotten better food elsewhere for the same price. Friends had warned me that under the current management, Casa del Rio's level of service has not improved since 2015. Note to management: don't just live off your good location in Melaka, put some effort into training your staff on how to provide a good level of service that should be expected from a 5 star hotel (this includes training your kitchen staff to not oversalt food! .