Frk. Schmidt — Local services in Bergen

I really wanted to like this place based on the reviews and the web site. Ok, let’s get a few things out of the way. The prices at the restaurant are higher than what is listed on the web site. The ambience is nowhere near a cozy as depicted. The restaurant is at the end of a cigarette butt strewn alleyway, in a cellar and the decor is essentially late-century cafeteria. Oh, and were you coming for the reindeer steak? Well, I’ve got some bad news for you sunshine. Despite what the web site says, there is no reindeer steak, only reindeer stew (read: we couldn’t serve this as steak any more so we made a stew out of it to keep from losing money). Good news though, fellow foodie - it’s 20 NOK cheaper.

Service: It’s an understatement to say there is serious room for improvement.

When being seated, we asked for a quieter, open 2-top and were told that we could only have that one for 30 minutes. This was quite puzzling as the table was unoccupied for our entire 90-minute stay.

At no point after getting our food did either server come by to check to see if everything was ok. My wife had to walk to the bar to get a second glass of wine.

Beverages: While I cannot speak for the beer or wine, you can have any cocktail that you want here, as long as it’s one of the handful that are actually on the menu. I asked for a Manhattan and was told, “we don’t do that here.” Dude, I can see the ingredients. Oh wait, they were out of Lyng gin for the listed gin and tonic, so minus one there too.

Food: My wife enjoyed her salad, which is saying a lot as she’s not much of a veggie eater. The fish pie was tasty though I’m not sure that I’d serve boiled potatoes as a side for with a fish pie that’s mostly potatoes too but . The cole slaw saw very good.

This place has promise but the service is atrocious and what you see (on the web site) is definitely NOT...

Disclaimer - I didn’t even get to eat any of the food. This is a horrible service complaint.

They have a sister restaurant upstairs (Pingvinen) and earlier in the day my wife and I spoke to one of the staff to ask if we could sit in with our dogs and some friends later. He was super nice, but said no, we could sit outside, downstairs at the sister restaurant (Frk. Schmidt) and have the same menu. Totally fine by us.

We returned to Frk. Schmidt a few hours later and I went in to ask about this in my best Norsk. The guy behind the bar was completely dismissive and rude, treated me like an inconvenience and said they were too busy to bring food outside. Weirdly, he then said we could have spekemat but that was it.

I was so confused I asked my Norwegian wife to go in and make sure I wasn’t mistaken! She got the same treatment despite explaining what we’d been told earlier. He then blanked her when she asked if it would be good to talk to the guy upstairs about the confusion.

They clearly need to improve communication between the staff of the two restaurants and also have a word with the people downstairs about how to deal...

We’ve started with a nice cheese platter to get us going and than we dove into the mains

I took the Reindeer sirloin, the source was very good, the creamy mushrooms were excellent but the steak was over done

The deer casserole and the meatballs had more success

The wine list was also not great, for those of use who use Vivino I’ll say that the best wine by the glass scored 3.9 and at lesser for me didn’t have the right grape … but that may be only a me thing

We were unfortunate to visit on a day when a full failure of the payments systems took place, they couldn’t accept any credit card nor where they willing to accept Euros - I had to go to a few ATMs to manage to get cash as the same system failure also affected the banks - whilst it certainly wasn’t the restaurant fault it was their responsibility to let us know we’ll have to go scouting for cash before the meal so the deciding would be up to us if we do or don’t want to go ahead with the meal

All in all, most of the people were pleased with the meal but...