botaniCa - Kitchener

When entering, it kind of seems like you're going to be eating in the lobby of the hotel. You can definitely smell the hotel pool at your table, so the atmosphere is not the best. However the menu was interesting and the food was very good and the specials are creative. The price was also pretty good considering it's in a hotel.

Great breakfast buffet - lots of variety, pastries fresh, salmon etc. Good price as well. Can't go wrong - love this restaurant

My husband and I visited BotaniCa last night, also using our Living Social coupon. We both had the squash soup accompanied with warm rolls with butter. I had the chicken schnitzel and my husband had the brisket. Our entrees and meals were amazing! The flavours, the textures and the plating presentation were excellent. These portions are very, very generous and we couldn't finish our meals. Alicia was our server and we found her attentive and engaging. Our chef (sorry I've forgotten her name) came out to meet us and ensure that our meals were satisfactory. My husband and I were very impressed with our meals and the BotaniCa staff. We will certainly be putting this restaurant on our list to return to.

BotaniCa is the restaurant in the Delta Kitchener, which is a depressingly old hotel that I have never had to stay inside. It is only open for dinner a couple of days a week. The restaurant claims to be a locavore-ish restaurant. The posted dinner menu has tasty things like fried chicken with lavender honey, or squash ravioli. All beers on tap are local.That same menu is posted in the window of the restaurant that fronts on King St. The menu we ate off of, however, was not that at all.But it's much more irritating than that. To get to the restaurant, you walk around the pool. It's humid, and there's not enough a/c. We stood there for 5 minutes waiting, listening to the yelling of the poolgoers, looking at the menu (the real one, which is much less interesting than the one in a window), and musing about the fact that they had a $20 buffet that included dessert, soup, bread, and a bunch of mains and sides. Ostensibly, our LivingSocial dinner was a $72 value for $36, which makes it complicated to figure out how we were supposed to get to $36 in value a piece from a restaurant that runs a $20 buffet.The restaurant wanted to seat us by a family with three children under 5, and showed us the two-course menu that we were supposed to order off of ($36? two courses and a glass of wine!?). I was pretty convinced, at this point, that the right answer was to go to The 41 (down the street, and actually tasty), but we decided it was possible we wouldn't regret the meal.We regretted the meal. The wine we could choose between were Barefoot Chardonnay ("all of our beers are local"; guess that doesn't apply to the wines) and a Colio red (it might even be from Ontario). The white was, well, fine. We had it by around fifteen minutes after we'd arrived (including the 5 minute wait for a table).The restaurant was amazingly loud. Lots of kids, bad sound design, no masking sound, no music, no acoustic tile. Brick walls and glass. (It turns out that the noisy families were actually Jehovah's Witnesses at a convention...I guess that's okay, and it is true that hotel restaurants do often have children at them.)The reduced menu they offered us was two first courses (soup or salad!) and four main courses; D. had the salad and butter chicken, while I had soup (hot and sour, which was mostly strange) and pasta. My main course was basically a bunch of cheese ravioli swimming in a tomato-cream sauce, with a piece of "garlic baguette", which had no flavour. They were filling, but, um, "local"? Not so much. D's salad had blueberries in it; the only local berries then would have been strawberries. There were enoki mushrooms in my soup; local? Maybe? Certainly, they didn't offer us the "botaniCa 100 Mile Farmers Board: Bunderfleisch, Lachsschinken, Regional Cheeses, Apple Fig Chutney, Cider Mustard, Pickled Fall Vegetables". My dinner companion's butter chicken ("the chefs obsession!") featured naan that, um, looked like a Lebanese pita.In the end, this was two courses I might have paid $15 for, accompanied by wine I wouldn't have drunk. So maybe (maybe!) we got our money's worth, but it's a toss-up. But the meal itself was completely banal, badly served, in a terrible atmosphere, and bore no resemblance to the posted menu.

This is one of the best dining experiences my wife and I have had in downtown Kitchener in the 20+ years we have lived here.