I recently took my Mum and Sister here when they visited from out of town. We had breakfast and coffee and the experience was very pleasant. The staff were friendly and accommodating - as we hadn't booked - and the food was delicious.
Great coffee too.
The view is gorgeous - only marred by the huge IGA sign planted right in front of your eyes. Not Boats' fault - just the poor planning & design of others. But that's a gripe for another site!

Approximate cost: $15

Boats offers unpretentious food at a competitive price, and friendly service, but what also brings us back again and again is the outlook directly towards the marina and the bay beyond.

We should have known the minute we arrived at 12.00 pm and saw a pile of dirty laundry in a chair at Reception that things were not going to go well. Not only that, but they'd given away our table that I'd expressly gone to the restaurant two days before to reserve. Great! When I complained about this, the staff had absolutely no idea what to do. Already it was chaos; waitresses walking around saying "has anyone seen any menus?" and diners already looking frustrated. We eventually got to our table and our son said "Mum, why are the tablecloths damp?" and he was right - they were! YUK! And yuk too to the less than clean plates in the middle of the table holding a salt shaker and the remains of someone else's sugar sachet. Our entrees came and were OK, although the chips were only luke-warm. Lucky we ate them all though, as the wait for our main courses was going to be a long one. At 1.35pm we asked where our main meals were as we were beginning to lose the will to live. "2 minutes!" came the reply. Ten minutes later, the meals arrived. The kids meals looked good and my barramundi certainly looked OK. But my husband's medium-rare fillet steak was the colour of old leather and as well done as it's possible to be. He told the waitress to take it away; she brought it back a minute later saying "the chef said it would take 30 minutes to do another, or you can have this one back for free". My husband firmly declined. When we asked just why it would take 30 minutes to do a medium-rare steak the waitress could only say "sorry, that's what the chef said.". Needless to say, I abandoned my barramundi and we left, refusing to pay for anything other than the kids' meals. I asked where the owner was and was told she was "over the road at our other restaurant, Olivers". We left, walking past the dirty laundry still sitting at Reception. I dropped in to Olivers and spoke to the owner, thinking she might want to know about our disastrous experience. Nothing could have been further from the truth! She said "you don't understand the stress we're under!" and "there's nothing I can do about how they work over there". At one point, she actually put her hands over her ears and walked away from me in mid-sentence. We were just staggered; we weren't giving her a hard time, we just thought she'd like to know some honest feedback. We'd been to Olivers before and had some really nice meals, but now we're never going to go there again either!
Boats has a stunning location, but that's all!

Approximate cost: $30