Bol de vie — Restaurant in Montreal

The reviews on here and on Skip speak so highly of this place but that's not reflected in our order tonight. We started writing reviews on here to help others make good choices and so we take pride in the things we write, no matter how good or how harsh and I'm really sorry to the owner but I apologize in advance for this one.

Let's start with the Vegan Bowl. The description on Skip was great, tons of veggies, sounded tasty and healthy, that's exactly what we were looking for tonight and the image they used was so colourful! But the bowl we received was missing the falafels, the radishes, the "baby vegetables" and the parsley (who cares about a garnish though, right?). At this point in the review, it's worth pausing to look at the photo of the bowl we received vs. the bowl they advertised.

Next up the sandwiches, we had two in our order, the Italian and the Chicken Tikka, once again, great descriptions: but we received a soggy mess, with hardly any vegetables (it was as if they had run out and the staff were too eager to finish their shift rather than take the time to prep more veggies and make a proper sandwich as described. Then the bread (which they boast about in their descriptions), I had such high expectations for this part of the sandwich but in the end it was this bland, pasty, pale oval.

Finally the nail in the coffin, a promo for a free cheesecake with any order over $35! I genuinely laughed aloud when I saw what they gave us. I know cheesecake isn't cheap but this restaurant definitely is. The piece we got was so small, it could almost fit on the end of my fork and if I had a label to put on it, it would be a "two bite" cheesecake or a maybe even "bite size". Once again, see our photos (fork for scale) it was like the size of a piece that your weight conscious uncle would cut at thanksgiving, less than an inch wide which would have been acceptable, if it was a standard cheesecake but this one also stunted in height. I really hope this is not what customers would receive if they were paying full price for that slice!

I'm sure that 0 stars is not an option on Google because angry customers would probably abuse it like crazy over trivia things and it would certainly skew the rating system but if you read this far, then you know what we think of this place.

Skip refunded us for the bowl and gave a decent discount on the sandwiches, unfortunately we still ended up making breakfast for dinner because we weren't eating Bol de Vie tonight. No second chances for this place. I hope the manager/or owner take notice of this review and maybe put more pride in their menu if they don't want to read more reviews like this from future customers.

EDIT: After reading the owner's reply I decided to rebuttal a couple things. I've added a photo of the Vegan bowl as soon as we lifted the lid, items are still missing I don't see how that changes anything. I agree that humans make mistakes, we're not perfect and that's acceptable. Missing one ingredient? Cool, yeah no big deal. Missing two? Hm, that's not right. Missing three or four out of a bowl like this one is means nearly 40% of the dish itself is missing and I think our feedback on the matter is proven justified, since Skip agreed and refunded it. I agree that reviews should give restaurants constructive criticism and help them improve, which is what we've done: improve your attention to detail and quality of the food. We would have given constructive feedback about the flavours of the dishes themselves, if we had received enough of the dishes to make proper reviews of them. I'm not going to review a bowl that's missing half the proteins and supporting elements because that would be unfair to your recipes. Regarding your cheesecake promo, I addressed the size of it because you have to consider how customers perceive it. If you scale down the size of your free dessert because its free, then call it as it is, "a free sample". I'd get more analytical about your marketing fail but Google's character limit is cutting me off here. Hope this was more helpful...

Had a bad experience with an order due to very bad service. Ordered from their website to support the business, but after 1h10 of wait we call them for heads up and they told us they couldn’t find a driver for the delivery but that they would try again. After 1:40h we finally get a call from them to inform that they couldn’t deliver and also asked us to do their work and do a refund request.

That was not the first time ordering with this restaurant, while the other time was not great again cause extra protein was not added in an ordered bowl but...

Tried Bol de Vie for a salmon poke bowl. I really appreciated that they replaced the falafel (which they were out of) with extra avocado. That said, falafel feels like an unusual topping for a poke bowl. There were also strawberries included, which didn’t quite blend with the other flavours for me.

As constructive feedback, they have a very diverse menu (sandwiches, smoothie bowls, burrito bowls, etc.) which I didn’t get a chance to try, but I’d say poke might not be their strongest offering. I’d be open to going back to explore the rest...