After discovering all the places for brunch and bottomless brunch in Bournemouth, I was keen to experience the Turtle Bay brunch. Turtle Bay (24 Madeira road, BH1 1NL) is located in an easy to get to location in Bournemouth. Just a 10 minute walk from Bournemouth Pier, or 15 minute walk from the Bournemouth train station.
The glass fronted restaurant is bright and spacious across two levels with plenty of outdoor seating. When the weather is nice, and all the doors are open, there is a great vibe carrying out to the patio seating. Whilst there are plenty of other restaurants nearby, there isn’t any feeling of being overlooked or crowded here.
Turtle Bay Bottomless Brunch
Pre booking your bottomless brunch at Turtle Bay is essential as there are limited tables allocated to the bottomless brunch experience each day.
You will receive 2 hours of unlimited cocktails, mocktails and Red Stripe, bellinis and prosecco. Any brunch dish, burger or fresh roti dish for £28.50 per person. Bottomless brunch is available every day until 3pm Monday – Saturday and 5pm on Sundays.
Our Turtle Bay Bournemouth Brunch Experience
Despite attempting to book a bottomless brunch, there was no availability in the end so we opted for a brunch and lunch experience instead. Happy hour at Turtle Bay is Sunday – Thursday 10am – 7pm, and 9.30pm to close. On Friday and Saturdays happy hour is 10am – 7pm and 10pm to close.
Happy hour offers 2-4-1 on all cocktails and mocktails. You just have to order two of the same drink at the same time.
We were seated quickly upon arrival, but did find the service quite slow. We weren’t sure whether this was because our server looked to be serving quite a lot of tables, or whether making cocktails is quite time consuming making the serving process even longer.
The menu is quite vast, but we all opted for burgers as they looked nice being sent out to tables around us. When ordering food it’s important to note that your brunch dish doesn’t come with a side dish, so ordering a burger will be just that. Sides of fries for example are an additional cost, but in my opinion essential to the meal.
If you’re choosing cocktails, as we were, it’s a good idea to try some different drinks that you may not normally choose. The cocktail menu is also very extensive with 23 different options to choose from.
The cocktails are all rum based, which makes sense being a Caribbean themed bar, however some of the options were available to be made with gin or vodka as well.
In our allocated two hour sitting, we managed to drink six cocktails each and a meal. Once the initial slow start to the service was over, the speed really picked up and was timed well to match our drink levels.
Choosing different cocktails to try is fun, but it’s worth noting that they don’t scrimp on the shot levels. Some of the choices such as the strawberry daiquiri and Island Iced Tea were very strong in flavour!
Critiquing our food, out of the three burgers ordered, two were the hot chick burger which consisted of crispy coconut fried chicken with a splash of hot sauce. The feedback on these were that the chicken was a little bland, and the meat was thigh meat rather than breast which the menu didn’t suggest.
The shack stack burger, a beef burger with lettuce, gherkin, tomato, bacon and cheese was much nicer with a lot more flavour. The side of spiced fries were also very tasty, if a little spicy.
Despite not being able to enjoy a bottomless brunch experience, having the cocktails on a 2-4-1 offer, I think we all managed to get some good value for money against the price for bottomless brunch.
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