Gado Gado — Restaurant in Ghent

I can't in good faith provide a positive review of this restaurant. We arrived at the restaurant at 8:50pm for our 9:00pm booking...which they didn't seem to have. They arranged a table for us anyway, and from then on the service level deteriorated very quickly. It took quite a long time before we were given menus, then a long time again before we got our drinks. Having waited 45 minutes, we asked about our food, and the waiter told us maybe another 15 minutes for our starter! 1 hour wait for a starter? We told them this is quite excessive and rather than being apologetic, she just chalked it up to being a busy Saturday night. We decided we didn't want to wait any more so went to one of the waiters to pay for our drinks, and to our surprise, the restaurant was somewhat empty! All the servers seemed really flustered and ran around doing busy work and we had to wait yet another 5 minutes for them to ring up our drinks. In the end, we left at 10:15 not having seen any food, which is close to 1.5 hours. I suppose it happens that restaurants can get busy, but it was just the way everything was handled and how we were ignored for a large part of the visit, and their defensiveness about the delay, etc. And the food wasn't cheap, so we just couldn't bear paying them what might have been €70-80 for the privilege of poor service. We walked over to the street vendors around the corner to get a hot dog and beers instead which saved us quite a...

Going to a new restaurant is a chance to go on a culinary adventure in the hands of strangers. We came to crowded Gado Gado with high hopes and were initially pleased with the service.

Ten minutes after we got there, another couple was seated at the next table. Drinks and starters came out at a slow but not unreasonable pace. While the neighbouring couple were served a set of dishes, we sat and waited. Five minutes passed, then ten and then twenty. Finally as they were finishing up, the server came to their table, not ours, to apologize to them for bringing them our dinner. I had to flag him down to get him to explain it to us. Eventually he brought us food and didn’t charge for that part of the bill. The woman who took our order never even came back to speak to us after the error.

After the drawn-out ordeal, we couldn’t get back to the train station on time so waited in frigid weather 90 minutes longer for the last train back home. I don’t remember the food, but this was the most humiliating culinary adventure I’ve had in a...

I especially went here to for "Sambal Goreng Udang" (prawn fried in sambal) and what I got was some sort of prawn curry. I asked if theres a mistake in the order, and the waiter said that the dish was indeed the "sambal goreng udang". It was very dissapointing.

We have to wait long for the food to arrive and my dish was only served when my friend has almost finished his "Gule Sayur" (Indonesian vegetable curry) which tastes very similar with my food, the difference was I got the prawn version of it.

To be fair, the beer and cocktail was good, friendly staff and nice athmosphere.

But I cannot in a good faith recommend this place for someone who is looking to eat authentic...