Marco Polo noodles — Restaurant in Bruges

TL;DR - Rude cook/host/waitress, Overcooked, dry, possibly bad pork, average springrolls, underseasoned, underspiced broth and 2.5euro for a bottle of water. AVOID!

Made a reservation online and walked in exactly on time. The lady in the front (who is supposedly the cook) was messing around with her phone and seemed annoyed that i asked her where my table was. Turns out the reservation was kind of pointless anyway since the place was empty. Not a good start.

I ordered the veggie thai spring rolls and the Kimchi ramen with pork. The spring rolls were good but nothing unique, didn't taste any better than your run of the mill grocery store frozen spring roll and the sauce it came with is also the standard orange sauce aka duck sauce you can find in literally every asian restaurant.

Onto the ramen, the pork was overcooked, dry and possibly borderline bad as well - spent the next two days feeling nauseated. The broth was ok but inconsistent, could have been seasoned some more and could be spiced more liberally as well.

Finally this is not necessarily a criticism of this place specifically - but no place in this town serves tap water for free. This should be illegal in my opinion. They claim tap water is safe to drink, but not a single restaurant will serve you water they presumably cook with in a glass. You can purchase either still/sparkling water and the pricing is inconsistent across multiple restaurants. Anywhere from 1.5euro to 4euro. This place charged 2.5 euro which is unacceptable for a hole in the wall noodle restaurant.

1 star for not screwing up the spring rolls and barely acceptable ramen broth. If this was the only restaurant open in town, i'd rather...

When we got to know Marco Polo, what made it special was the quality and quantity to price ratio. It was often very crowded (obviously) also because the place is small. We even recommended it to our friends for what made it special. Recently the price has increased and the quality decreased (some ingredients are missing and it feels like less attention is given to detail). We decided to give the benefit of doubt and thought maybe the lack of what was there before was due to the crowded times. Today we went back to pick take away. When we got home, we see that quantity has also been reduced! And judging from what we are getting, it suddenly looks way overpriced! Sad that it's not the same anymore...

Update 21/05/2022: It is only fair that I mention Marco Polo appears to have resolved the issues and quality and quantity seems to be back to what it used to be. We ordered take away and we saw that all ingredients were there and details were good (crispy peanuts back again, and contrast wet/dry between ingredients, instead of the all-wet bland food we had previously gotten). For that reason I am changing my rating back to 5 stars. Please keep it that way. For us, consistent quality is more important than the compensation free meal (which we never went for). They brought back the quality, so we are...

The first thing you will notice entering the restaurant is the incredible ambiance that they have created. It looks authentic and cozy at the same time. The staff, I can’t say anything bad about. The service was on point. Even though the restaurant was full I didn’t have to wait a lot for my order to be taken or for my food to be prepared which only speaks for great organisation among the staff. Of course, let’s not forget about the food. It was great. Also a thing to note is since Belgium can be quite expensive I was impressed by their price to size ratio. Fairly big portions for the price and of course free rice refills. Finally I just wanted to point out some things that can be improved as well since there’s nothing perfect. One of them being the size of the restaurant. I found it quite suffocating at times because it was so packed with people that at times even the staff had a hard time walking around. Overall I highly recommend to anyone craving some Asian food to visit this restaurant at least once. It is a great place, with great food, nice staff and...