I arrived at my hotel at 2 pm, and was hungry, so unfortunately I took the advice of my hotel instead of consulting the research I had done ahead of time.
I ordered the veal wiener schnitzel and was given a thin, gristly, grey sheet of meat along with potatoes that had a decent consistency but tasted watery and wan.
During my meal, the waiter and a portly gentleman (the manager or owner) kept fluttering to and from the table next to mine, setting and unsetting the table. It was odd, but then I thought that perhaps the waiter was being trained. It was also annoying, because if he was being trained, I was the only one in the restaurant, so they could have done this in another part of the restaurant. In any case, after a time, they disappeared.
The potatoes were so tasteless that I thought that mayonnaise would help. I didn't see my waiter for at least fifteen or twenty minutes so I got up and walked around the restaurant until I found the portly gentleman, and asked him for mayonnaise.
He arrived with a large plate, and I hoped he hadn't filled the plate with mayonnaise.
Instead there was one little packet of mayonnaise. "Okay," I thought. It was insipid, inedibly so, but I figured, "Oh well."
Only later that evening, when I was putting away my receipts, did I see that they had charged me 1 euro for that packet of mayonnaise! A packet that would be given away in any fast food place, and that was inedible to boot. That was inconscionable, to charge so much for something that probably cost 1/20th of what they charged me.
The next day a friend of a friend took me to Alt Wien cafe, where I had a real authentic wiener schnitzel with potatoes as they should be, and it was delicious, and less expensive. The next day I saw a couple perusing the menu of this place (Morris) and I so wanted to warn them, but given how criminally wrong the food and the prices were, I was afraid to say anything, lest some gangster come out and accost me.
I have never before had a meal that was so terrible and so overcharged. And charging 1 euro for a packet of mayonnaise was absolute robbery. read more