Restaurant Ikarus — Restaurant in Salzburg

So, we have been to Hangar 7 and Ikarus before a couple of years ago, sadly this time our experience was not great. Which was sad as it was to celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary. I'll talk about the restaurant and service first, as Ikarus has guest chefs each month. We had a booking for 7pm arrived a couple of minutes after 7 and were told we could not go up to our table, and either had to go to the bar for a drink or wait at reception !!! Not a great start. Then we were constantly pressured to have more wine throughout the meal despite saying my husband was driving home 1 1/2 hours after the meal, the glasses of wine were also a very mean 100ml maybe less.

Now I will move on to the food, the guest chef was Paul Cunningham. I have to say this was the the worst and one of the most expensive Michelin * meals I have ever eaten. You can choose 8 courses or 6, we went for 8 which was a big mistake. Some of the dishes were nice in themselves. 4 quite big appetizers arrived, the mussels and oyster were really good, the fennel tough you could not bite it. The popadom too big but nice. The the first course caviar on a really stodgy crumpet too heavy. The turbot in beurre blanc, nice but very creamy and big, the marsala langoustine, again really creamy. Then beef and onion consomme with Stilton toast, nice but stodgy. The beef with shallot. Then cheese and truffle toastie, which was essentially half a cheese toastie, huge. So by this time too much cheese and beef, I left half my beef, and 3/4 of the toastie. I just wanted to go home, this was about 3 hours into the meal. Then a very simple but nice peach desert, the highlight of the meal but something I could cook at home. Finally the worst and most disgusting looking chocolate desert I have ever seen or eaten, essentially half a large plate smeared with brown and not tasty really wishy washy flavor.

Sorry this review is so long, but so was the meal a wasted 5 hours , and £ 600 for the privilege, with hardly any wine and a massive pressure for a tip. Don't go there is much better food in the...

We visited Ikarus to celebrate our anniversary on the 4th of July— our very first time dining at a Michelin-starred restaurant. Expectations were high. Unfortunately, the experience left us disappointed.

From the moment we told the sommelier we’d only be drinking water (for health reasons), the atmosphere shifted. One server in particular acted noticeably distant. Eye contact was minimal, and the descriptions of the dishes at our table were far shorter than what we overheard at nearby tables with wine pairings. It left us with the uncomfortable feeling of being treated as “lesser guests.”

Some dishes were good — the carabinero, the hake, the bread, and the desserts. But none of the courses tasted special or delivered a “wow” moment. A piece of raw toro was too large to eat in one bite, yet too sinewy to bite through — it slipped off the base and had to be pulled apart by hand. A scallop course smelled intensely fishy, to the point where my partner couldn’t eat it. Small details, like a visible vinaigrette smear on the side of a serving pedestal, felt off-brand for this level of fine dining. The petit fours at the end tasted no different from store-bought candy.

One highlight: a blonde female server (possibly the maître d’) was exceptionally warm and welcoming.

I shared this feedback privately with the restaurant before posting this review. The response was polite yet underwhelming — essentially: “Sorry it didn’t meet your expectations. We still hope you’ll return.”

All in all, for a restaurant with 2 Michelin stars and the associated price point, this visit didn’t come close to delivering the quality or experience we hoped for. We might have been at a bad moment, so it’d be unjust to condemn the whole restaurant for eternity. But trying it out again is not worth it for us, given our experience and the high...

This might be the most difficult review I ever wrote. I have been to my fair share of high class restaurants, but I can't remember a visit as bad as to Ikarus, when I visited Salzburg with my wife.

Let me preface this with a disclaimer. The food was good. We had the 8 course menu by the guest chef Anthony Genovese which was slightly adjusted as we don't eat meat. Therefore two courses with meat were switched with vegetarian courses.

We had a table reserved for 7 pm and were greeted very friendly by the lady at the entrance and brought to our table. However, from them on something was off. At first I thought I was just imaging things, but my wife felt the same. We felt like the service did not like us, like we were disturbing them. We were treated cold and unfriendly. We asked for a wine pairing, but we did not want 8 glasses of wine each and asked if we could get just 4 glasses for the 8 course menu. This was seen as a very strange request, but the female waiter said she would accommodate our wish. However we did not get a wine for the first course. We then asked the sommelier and he brought us the first glass. However, then we had to ask again for another glass when we got the third course. As I wrote in the beginning, this review is very difficult as there were no other special incidents, just this strange vibe. The whole time we felt like everyone around us was treated more nicely and warm-hearted. I really regret that I did not speak up and ask the service what was wrong and why they thought we deserved such...