Sandro — Restaurant in Helsinki sub-region

HORRENDOUS PLACE! I have been to two other Sandros: Eira and Kallio. Although the one in Kallio does not have good service, the essence of "Sandro" remains. However, this particular "Sandro" is SO different and SO terrible that it could be called a different name and I would not even guess it comes from a Sandro's franchise.

The full idea of this place is outrageous. I went with a group of guests to this restaurant hoping for more than decent food. First we found out that on a Sunday there is only a "buffet" option that costs 33 euros! In my (many) previous experiences in the other two Sandros, the main menu has a great selection so we decided to come back another time during the week.

When we came back, they took MORE THAN AN HOUR to deliver our food. Most of it was cold and some of the food arrived after other people had finished eating.

One of the dishes was sent to the wrong table. When we tried to clarify that it was our dish we were told that they could not hand this dish to us anymore. Not surprisingly, many minutes later this SAME dish arrived to our table.

The waiter took away the cutlery of those whose food got reheated and no cutlery was provided to us later. I asked a waitress, who just decided to ignore me, so a member of my group had to personally go and fetch his own fork.

The menu is SO different than the regular menu at the other two Sandro's that the dishes were not even worth the wait. The dishes were small and extremely expensive. The dishes, their quality was totally incomparable to the other two places. I was shocked to see that there was such a different restaurant under the same name. My guests ended up buying a FULL meal in a bar later that evening because the meal at "Sandro" was not enough. We only heard a "sorry for this" from the waiter but no more. I felt extreme embarassement to have taken these guests...

The Saturday brunch buffet costs 32€ but it was rather disappointing for its price. The shrimps in their cold dish section were a bit “too cold” - they were still frozen! We literally tasted ice in the shrimps. We let the waitress know about it, and the reply we got was that they were still edible…… well, 32€ is a price for something more than “edible” in my opinion.

The hot dish was, ironically enough, also too hot 😀- they left the huge metal spoons burning under the heating lamps and my friend burned her fingers thanks to that. Besides, they had probably left the hot dish under the heating lamps for too long that the fried chicken was really dry and hard to chew on. I don’t like wasting food but I had to leave the 2.5 pieces of fried chicken this time because they were too difficult to eat.

Luckily the dessert and coffee were all good so this restaurant is...

I usually don't use words like "catastrophic" or "horrible" to describe a restaurant, but I'm honestly short of better description for this place's service level. We arrived for dinner when the restaurant was not even 1/4 full, but it took us 20 minutes to place an order and 1 hour for the foods. There were 3 waiters but they all scattered around or stood behind the corners. They were not attentive at all. One waitress kept pushing alcoholic drinks to us even though we repeated many times that we're fine with soft drinks. On the other hands, some of the foods were delicious. The main dishes were all too heavy and the taste was unremarkable, but the meze dishes, flat breads, as well as desserts were all lovely. Despite of the good foods, I will definitely never come back here again unless the...