Konoba Dalmacija - Tavern — Restaurant in Grad Zadar

Spoiler: service this year is poor and I want to use this way to give a feedback to Konoba to be good again. This was my favourite restaurant for about 10years. I come there 4-5 times every summer with a groups and used to recommend it to everyone visiting for the first time. I really enjoyed the host that used to work in the past years and waiters were always efficient and polite. Garden is perfect to escape the crowds. This year first time I visited at Easter time and we ordered buzara mussels as a starter and half of the fish platter as I was only with a friend (my usual order). We received starter and a main at the same time, portion was not half and it was clearly that ‘black hair girl from Sarajevo’ was new… we have all been there and restaurant didn’t charge us for all even though they tried to pack the rest (grilled fish) to take away. Mistakes can happen. Couple weeks ago service was good, experienced gentleman served us the lunches, but there were about 5-8wasps around each meal. Having couple of children and one allergic person in the group it wasn’t pleasant… well, they were eating standing/running and quick. Sign that fish was good! #positives Tonight I went there again with 3 teenagers (standard crew). And as this time was evening, wasps were replaced with mosquitos. Ive noticed they had some burning sticks to keep them away. It was quick that we have received one under the table but in 5mins each of us counted 8-12bites … we can’t control the nature but none of this was there so intensively previous 10years. Music was levelled down so we can enjoy loud sound of the air cons in the garden… Now the worst part was the black hair waiter mentioned earlier. Unfortunately we had to meet again, and I was open to see the improvements. Again, long wait for the mussels as she just does not get that starter should be first. And we were only table being served at that time. So she brought main platter then the mussels… making the table looks like Benkovački sajam aka overcrowded. We didn’t get lemon wet tissues, so I had to ask for one by going inside to look for service as my waiter was having some scrolling time. Then no checking on us so had to look for someone for the bread… Sizes of sea bass and orada(only know Croatian name) were smaller, I assumed as I was with ‘children’. At that point I decided to express all written above face to face rather than giving this negative feedback as I also work in tourism and know how affective this is. Trigger for me to write was how the waitress never tried to apology, furthermore she said that IT IS NOT COMMON TO GET WET TOWELS EVERY TIME. When she was handing it to me earlier she said, she will even hand me some for the children (!)Then I realised that she just does not listen=there was no room to improvement. But there are plenty of other places to explore in Zadar. This was definitely my 50th-ish and last visit as this was not cool. Pozdrav konobarici Zagrebackoj Zadranki- e to je bio servis...

Please don't be seduced by the beautiful courtyard and the apparently nice staff. This is by far one of the worst restaurant we have ever been to. The starters we shared were oke, scampi and octopus from the grill did taste good, but also we had four different main dishes and none of these four dishes were what you expected. The first dish was gnocci with prosciutto and mushrooms, which looked more like a ready-made pot containing cooked bacon bits and small pieces of mushrooms that you could barely recognize. Another dish was black risotto with seafood, but it was not at all clear which seafood was actually in it as everything tasted the same and there was hardly any clearly recognizable seafood. Third dish was a specialty of the kitchen (that's what it says on the menu): long-cooked stewed meat in a tomato sauce with gnocchi, but this was just a steak with a mediocre tomato soup with some ready-made gnocchi. The fourth dish I strongly advise against and unfortunately beat everything. Rump steak with green pepper sauce and polenta. This was nothing short of an embarrassment. The rump steak was very very tough, half of the meat consisted of an edge of fat and was fried much too dry. This while I had asked to prepare this medium rare. The peppercorn sauce that came with it was a watery limp soup that only tasted of cream. They even managed to ruin the polenta by frying it way too oily. I therefore also sent this dish back to the kitchen after I had unfortunately already become sick from the entire preparation. I strongly advise against eating here. The atmosphere that the courtyard creates is nice to have a drink, but the chefs just don't have it together in the kitchen. To top it all off, they just left everything on the bill and just let me pay because the kitchen thought it was just well made and it was our own opinion. If you have a death wish I would take...

Tempted by the reviews, we made a phone reservation for 4 people for 4:00 p.m. We arrived at 3:40 p.m., saying that we had reservations for 4:00 p.m., but maybe we would be able to get in earlier, and the person sitting in the doorway - the waiter/owner (?), in a very unpleasant tone said that he had a reservation for 1 p.m. Being sure what time I made a reservation for, because I repeated it 2 times, and at 1 p.m. we had other plans, I said that we made a reservation for 4 p.m., but I see that the garden empty, so if we can still go in. At this he started to arque, almost shout at us that he is not an idiot and that he had a reservation for 13:00.

I do not know if this was his bad day, or he misunderstood me over the phone, but very bad experience from the customer service perspective. I've never experienced something like this, and it's sad, because food-related reviews are good. If you will be going there and booking a table, make sure to triple check the hour.

Finally we decided to go to...