This used to be one of the best brunch restaurants in Edmonton, but a really negative experience has now soured my opinion.
Let me start with the good, they do have a tasty (although expensive) brunch, the building is nice, there's good people watching, it's quite authentic, and the place has a nice hipster feeling about it.
My negative experience started with a group of about 12 friends. We were the only people in the restaurant for the first 30 minutes. When we tried to order our food the waitress had a lot of difficulty understanding our order, as her English was quite poor. Fortunately one of the members in our group was able to translate to French, when necessary. This was a bit weird, but given that it's a French restaurant none of it was any sort of real problem so far. Things went downhill from here though.
We waited over 45 minutes to get our food, despite being the only people in the restaurant the majority of the time. When we finally did receive our food many of the dishes were not what we had ordered. We tried to explain this, but it was just met with confusion, and the waitress seemed frustrated and unable to communicate effectively since her English wasn't very good. It was clear that our orders would not be fixed, so we just made due with what we had.
The next issue was the food. About half our party had ordered different types of poutine and all of these dishes were completely cold upon arrival. The poutine was so cold that the gravy hadn't even melted the cheese. On the plus side those who ordered the shellfish dishes were much happier with their meals.
At the end of the meal we asked the waitress if the bills could be split, but it didn't seem like this would be possible. Again this wasn't a huge problem, but as we began to pay our bills we realized that the waitress seemed increasingly annoyed at us. She asked why we were not leaving tips. We were very confused by this, and calmly explained that because the bill was not split we were all just chipping in towards the bill and that a tip would be included in the total. The waitress seemed to think tips should be included in each payment using the tip function on the credit card reader. At this point her manager came out and asked if there was a problem, we explained the situation and the manager asked if she could just split the bill to alleviate the confusion. At this point the suggestion was laughable though since half of us had already paid. The rest of us paid the remaining share, and we did begrudgingly leave a 20% tip.
Finally as we were leaving the manager ran over complaining that we hadn't paid our billed. We told her that we had, and that even though the service was awful we had even included a (far too generous) tip. She demanded we come back so that she could show us how the receipts did not add up, so we did and together we added up the receipts to find that they added up just fine. This was met with a half hearted apology of, "yea I guess it does add up" to which we suggested that maybe our tip should just be refunded.
All in all this was probably the worst dining experience I've ever had in Edmonton. Maybe they were having a really off night, but I know that we won't be back for a long time. read more