In the mood for some award-winning dining? The other day we wined and dined at Hotel Eldorado.
The Hotel Eldorado offers a beautiful dining experience through their restaurant called “Lakeside Dining“. With tables right on the water, this restaurant makes for a spectacular romantic date night. During the summer, their outdoor patio serves plenty of fresh cocktails with a casual to business casual dress code. However, in the fall and winter things move indoors with bigger plates and a more sophisticated and intimate atmosphere.
Parking at this restaurant is one of the few places in Kelowna that offer valet parking! There is also paid public parking available just outside the hotel’s parking lot. I went here with two of my girlfriends and we’d have to say it was pretty darn good! We ordered the local cheese and charcuterie, Margherita flat bread, Eldorado lobster mac and cheese, and the El inspired Irish stew. Dessert is my favorite thing, but we were just too full to try any this time! Read on to see what we had to say about our experience and each delicious plate.
My Food Review of Hotel Eldorado
Let’s start this review off with the appetizer: The cheese and charcuterie board. A simple appetizer that screams high end is the charcuterie board. This particular board came with a selection of two meats and two cheeses, fruit, pickles, olives, chutney and Dijon. The portion sizes and house made seasonal fruit chutney were excellent! This board serves one to four depending on if you have more food coming or not.
Next up is the Margherita flat bread. This flat bread is perfect for those of us who love a delicious sauce. Their flat bread came with a thick layer of tomato sauce, that reminded me of when you’re taking your last piece of garlic bread to scrape up the final bits of mom’s spaghetti sauce. I mean waste not want not, right? Drizzled with pesto and oozing with mozzarella, this flat bread is best eaten ASAP. If you wait too long, the sauce can make the dough soggy, leaving you with a subpar experience.
This next dish came with high recommendations from our waiter, so we decided to give it a try. The lamb had ok reviews from my table, and was not quite as spectacular as it was hyped up to be. However, the saving grace in this dish was the gravy and all the fixings. So much flavor in one bowl!
Finally we moved onto the main course dishes which were the Eldorado lobster mac and cheese and the El inspired Irish stew. For being the most expensive thing on the menu, the lobster mac and cheese was good but lacked in seafood. We had ordered it with the addition of scallops but received only one on top of our dish. The saving grace here is the sauce. So. Damn. Good. I mean we had to order a second serving of bread to scoop it all out! You know what would be really good? If you could take their mac and cheese sauce and serve it as a fondue. Now that my friends would be heaven on earth.
Final Thoughts
My final thoughts on Lakeside dining at Hotel Eldorado are that it is definitely hyped up from the summer. Their watermelon salad and extensive cocktail selection are some of the best things to end a hot summer day. However, their fall and winter lineup does not give off the same energy. The food, compared to other award wining fine dining restaurants in the Okanagan lacks umph. When it comes to the highlight of the dish, whether it be the seafood, lamb, or charcuterie selection, something was not quite there. Highlights of this restaurant include all of their sauces which they absolutely nailed. I mean I would go back for the lobster mac and cheese in a heartbeat. The romantic and intimate setting they offer for a date night with your partner, friends or family is also unbeatable. But don’t just take my word for it! Make a reservation and add them to your Discovering Kelowna adventure.
