Eat.@ Kobe Jones Melbourne

Level 1, 427 Docklands Drive, Waterfront Venues, Docklands 3008 phone : (03) 9329 9173

Tuesday to Sunday, 12- 3pm, 6-10pm

Kobe Jones' Website describes its food as "modern Japanese with a twist", and I guess that's a fairly accurate general description.  The restaurant is located on the first floor which has lift access, and boasts a decent view over the harbour.  (My kids love watching the boats and the "rockets" - you will know what I mean if you ever go there and look out onto the pier)  The restaurant is spacious and we had no problems manoevring the pram around the tables or parking it next to our table.

We chose to have the lunch specials menu as it offered a good selection of food at a more family friendly price. (Available at lunch time only)  An a la Carte menu is available and is of course more expensive, but does give you a larger selection of menu items.  We were in a group of 4 adults and 2 kids plus our pram so we chose to have 4 set menus.  There are 3 set lunch menus priced $25, $29.5 and $34.5.  For each menu you can chose 3 out of the 5 options offered.  The dishes are about entree size and I was sceptical that we'd be full but by the end of the meal we were all quite pleasantly filled and the kids seemed to have enjoyed trying a bit of this and that!

Some of the dishes we tried :

Calamari Fritto

Seafood Poke



Prawn and Vegetable Tempura



Volcano Roll

Beef Tataki - the sauce was very nice!

Sashimi Salad



Lava Roll

Beef Katsu



Shallow Fried Soft Shell Crab



There were also options for various bento boxes priced at $25.  A kids bento box for $15 is advertised in the website but when we asked about it we were told they don't have a kids menu.  Hopefully they can either amend their menu or their website as I often use the presence of a kids' menu to assess the suitability of a restaurant for outings with kids and certainly felt a bit cheated when I was told otherwise.  Fortunately a lot of their menu options were kid-friendly!

The staff were friendly and were quite happy to provide cutlery and small plates for the kids.  On the 2 occasions we've dined there it had been during the week and there were no more than 2-3 other tables occupied and the patrons didn't seem to have minded the kids being noisy occasionally, but they were mainly business lunchers and we were certainly the only family there at those times. 



Eat.Play.Shop. Recommends : Calamari Fritto, Volcano Rolls and Beef Tataki were great

Give it a Miss : Beef Katsu were a bit too over done and tough

Highchairs - Yes
Toilets - clean and accessible, although we cheated and used the disabled one for the room as they were not busy