Restaurant L'Académie Gatineau — Restaurant in Gatineau

We were here to celebrate my mother in laws 60th birthday. The experience at this restaurant was one of the worst experiences we’ve had. We we’re approximately 17 people and the service was non existent besides ordering our food and recieving our food. We never got our drinks that we ordered, they were heavily short staffed, they never served us water, I had to personally go get my own pitcher of water and Ice and thats where I found out that their Ice machine actually was deffective. From visuals, it looks like the ice machine had to be reset for the ice cycle each time it made a batch so that would explain their Ice shortage. They are too cheap to fix their own ice machine but charge ridiculous prices for mediocre food. I would know, I work in the commercial kitchen repair industry. We recieved our food, the pulled pork poutine was heavily smothered in sauce and looked like a soup. Me and my girl friend ordered the steak which from visiual presentation, looked under cooked due to the steak having little to no colour. We ordered our steaks medium rare and they were still raw inside. We returned our steaks and they brought us back medium rare steaks and they forgot to season the steaks. It had no flavour and was super dissapointed. Another person ordered the Rissoto and they loved it, the chicken was ordered as well and it was apparently good. The rack of lamb had little to no meat according to one person. We also ordered Tea and coffee at the end of the dinner and the Tea arrived an hour later. Overall very horrible service and the cost of the food does not match the quality and service expected. The mind boggling part was that the restaurant was packed. Somehow this place was popular on a staturday evening which Probably watered down the service we expected. Will more than likely never...

I ordered several days in advance from their own website, they send me a reminder an hour before pick up on the day of and when I arrive at the exact time for pick up I'm told they didn't have my order in the system and I have to wait 30 minutes for them to make it. How did their system send me a reminder and not tell their cooks? Very strange.

Mistakes happen though, it sucks but I let them know I think I was due maybe some discount off my meal for my trouble or a small refund. Who I assume was the manager told me he was unable to offer any sort of refund but didn't really provide a reason and instead offered me a $25 gift card which I think may be fair if the food was really good....

It was not. The seafood linguini had sauce similar to michalenas frozen meals. There were a total of 5 mussels in my meal and no other "seafood" so bit of a let down. The main reason my wife and I choose this place was because of the steak tartar but what a disappointment that was. Last I checked tartar should not have stringy meat in it. Oh, our salad also had past wilted, practically decomposing leaves in there as well so really no saving grace to this experience other then the Staff being somewhat nice about the whole situation.

Clearly with such a long review I was not impressed, happy or even content. I will not be using the $25 gift card, after messing up my order you should have ensured what you handed me was your best quality food and it was terrible.

Inside the place seemed...

If I could leave zero star I would. Worse service ever. It took 45 minutes to simply be acknowledged by staff and get some water, 2 hours to get our food, and said food was terrible. We complained and had to fight staff over the fact that we had a terrible experience and we were not satisfied. We ordered food at 8:30 but somehow our order was sent to the kitchen at 9:15. My meat was very chewy/overcooked, one of my friends got a very dry fettucine dish, and we had to ask not once but twice to get her salad. Another ordered pork and ended up with steak, but refused to speak out because it took forever to get our food and just wanted to leave at that point. Out of 12 people, 9 had some serious issues with their food, 2 even returned their plates because it was inedible.

Manager offered $20 gift card per person but refused that we use it on our bill, meaning we would need to return in order to use it. We again had to fight so the $20 would be applied on our bill because we won't return to this establishment.

Women's restroom was not only disgusting, but a hazard with electrical wire exposed near the sink.

Very unprofessional establishment, with subpar pricey food, and disturbingly unsanitary and unsafe washroom. Very disappointed as in the past this was a great restaurant when it was located at 1100 Maloney boulevard.

I was celebrating my birthday and the overall experience truly ruined the event.

Avoid...