This story all started with a review by unlike that one of my friends shared. From the review, it…read morelooked like a hip and upcoming restaurant in Neukoelln with strong vegetarian and vegan side but with also a good amount of meat. Good enough, because our group of six people shared the same balance of carnivore and vegetarian.
Quite honestly, the food was just OK and a little bit overpriced for a bit mediocre taste. I had the penne with pesto accompanied by ladyfingers and cherry tomatoes.
The main thing, why this establishment got such a low rating, is that it was service that tip the boat into the area of infamous Servicewueste (Germany has a reputation of having bad service). It took almost twenty minutes until we got the menu. I thought this was quite an achievement. The restaurant itself wasn't crowded but wasn't empty either. I think it took the courage of one my female friends to get the wine menu and food menu.
In the end, we stayed at this place for three hours(!), more or less involuntarily, having paid for drinks, half of us getting the food and even of the people who got the food, one of us got the wrong dish. Only after some discussion, we received a halfhearted apology and a discount on one bottle of wine, all of which I thought should have given us for free because we gave them so many chances to get things rolling. The point is, they messed up whether the kitchen is to blame or not, and we are disappointed as customers. Sadly enough, because of that, half of our evening was ruined, and half of our people had no food.
And to be honest, I still do not understand why half of our group did not get their food. One of the girls got a salad, which did not even require heat to make. (Mind you, the manager was blaming the kitchen and kitchen was blaming a power outage) Two of my friends ordered the same thing, of which only one of the person got their dish. I think this rendered me speechless.
In my view, good service would have been to acknowledge that things went wrong and just try to make it up. As I said, we walked out disappointed, hungry, and a little furious about the time we spent there. All six of us will probably never go there again. This is not how people want to start their weekend.
