The Cowrie

Boy oh boy! This place is great! We booked a table for 8 on New Year’s Eve. Set menu (still had a lot of choice) was great. Everyone was happy with the options. My steak was great (Wanna say best I’ve had but that’s a big statement so I’ll say best I can remember).
Service was great. Polite fast and nothing too hard. We were last out but still didn’t feel rushed out. Second time here and I’ll be back for sure.

Fantastic.
We went here on Christmas Eve 2013. We’d booked ahead to ensure we got in for a special holiday meal.
The service was good. The building itself is OK, nothing special about the couple of rooms and simple tables. Parking around here is a bit of a pain.
But there are two things here that are great:
1. View. It’s perched on a hillside looking down over Terrigal, up the coast to Forresters Beach, and out to sea. It’s gorgeous, especially if you nab one of the tables right up at the window (which we did).
2. Food. And this is really what’s important in a restaurant, isn’t it? The dishes — both starter and main — were elaborately built in that fancy nouvelle cuisine way, but were substantial enough to fill you up. I had the goats’ cheese and caramelised onion tart with walnut, fig, nasturtium and wild herb salad to start; and the Tasmanian beef with crusted beef cheek, cabernet beetroot, goat’s curd and root vegetable sauce for my main. Powerful, rich flavours, beautifully presented. They had some nicely-​paired wines too.
It is not cheap, however. With entrees around $ 30 and mains around $ 45 it’s hard to call it value for money. But it is quality.