After hearing about this restaurant and grabbing a drink in their nice courtyard a week before our…read morevisit I was very excited about trying their BBQ pork dinner.
The setting is really the only good thing about this place, nice cozy courtyard in old town Stockholm with Cuban music. Our experience started out bad with the poor service level.
We were 4 people and one of us were late. The other three got to sit down and look at the menu. At a nice restaurant they would normally ask you pretty quickly if you would like to get a drink while
waiting for the last person. That did not happen here. After 15 min wait time we tried to flag down a waitress. She replied hurriedly with a "Söder" hipster attitude that she would be right with us. 5 min later she still has not come by so we flagged down another waiter. He was nice and took our drink order. They have two kinds of beer on tap, one light pilsner and one darker pale ale. The selection of bottled beer is limited but with a really good quality micro brew selection. When I ordered the pale ale, which was notably darker in the color than the pilsner, the same hipster waitress from our first encounter with their poor service brought me a pilsner. I pointed it out to her and she brought be a new one with the excuse that it was hard to see the color in the dark setting. That was totally BS since we could spot it from 5 meters away when she brought it. Now to the food, we all got the BBQ pork dinner which is kind of what the concept in this restaurant is about. 5 different parts of the pig served with triple fried French fries and three kind of dipping sauces for 275 SEK a person. Sounds really good, doesn't it? Well, there is a reason it is only 275 SEK. Here is the break down:
French fries, decent but have definitely had better. Sauces, eatable but not very good. Could have made all of these at home much better. Now to the important part, the meat. The pork belly and the
chuckadoodles were both pretty good. Nice smokey flavour and great texture.
The chops were pretty dry and over cooked and did not have that much flavour. The ribs were nothing to write home about, also dry and lacking flavour. Now to the horrible part, the pulled pork. I personally love pulled pork but this was one of the worst I have ever had. It was way over salted and spiced with too much cumin. The only way to eat it was to drench it with their mediocre BBQ sauce. Here is also when the service went even further downhill. My wife, who has worked in a lot of restaurants and a is a great chef, pointed out to our waitress that she should tell the chef that the pulled pork was way too salty. We did not expect anything in return, just a nice apology and a
"yes, I will definitely let him know. Thanks for telling us." This is the response we got "Uuuuhhh hmm ok". It is obvious they have hired a bunch of young people with no service experience what so ever. I think it is great to provide young people with work but please give them a crash course in customer service and normal behavior towards other people. This place would not have stayed open more than a month if it was in the US but since it is in Stockholm, were people expect bad service, it still is very busy. Overall: really nice atmosphere were meat lovers without taste buds could go to drink decent micro brews and wines for a reasonable price and be treated like an annoyance instead of a paying customer.
