Maison Weibel — Restaurant in Aix-en-Provence

Instagrammable, but otherwise disappointing service and mediocre baked goods for the price.

Row upon row of desserts and pastries are displayed inside, but if you choose to eat there you'll be told not to order and return to your table.

We sat down and it was 12 minutes before we could flag down a server. At minute 23, another server stopped by and asked if we wanted to eat anything; so had we not flagged one down that's how long it would have taken. It was about 15 minutes for our food to arrive: a coffee and pastries that were already available in the case.

The food, as the photos here will show, is very well presented. For its price, however, you'll find better pastries at traditional boulangerie for half (or likely even less) of what it will cost you here.

When we were finished, it took another 15 minutes to get the bill and the server left right away. Another 10 minutes, needing to flag down someone else to pay, they informed us that we need to pay inside.

Overall it took 70 minutes to eat a few pastries and a coffee. In the time we were at our table, a woman sat down at the table next to us. 15 minutes later, having no server stop by, she stood up and left. The couple who sat down next nearly did the same, but they were more proactive about going inside (three times) to find someone to help; for example, being served a salad with no silverware.

Food to eat at the tables is considerably more expensive than the prices listed inside. We never saw a menu at the table—thank god we knew what we wanted or it would have taken another 15–20 minutes, most likely—but the increase in price is far beyond what VAT and service justify. If we were allowed to order food to go and eat it there, that wouldn't be a problem, but they require you to order at the tables and then provide a horrible experience.

If you want to take photos to make your friends (and enemies) jealous, stop by. If you want to enjoy a light french breakfast and/or value your precious time on earth, go...

If you want the negative French experience in service, come to Weibel! This is so painful to write down; Weibel is one of our favorite restaurants in town for breakfast. They have this extraordinary “Weibel petit-dejeuner” which has delicious toasts with jam, coffee, juice, etc and among other things it has “compote”; compote is something quite French that not all international people like and more importantly, not for breakfast. Every time we have come here we have asked to change the “compote” to “muesli” (which they also carry as an option in the menu), and we pay for the difference in price, since muesli is more expensive than compote. We’ve been doing this for about a year. Today, we chose this place to start celebrating my partner’s birthday and the first thing we find is a very French “NO” in our request to exchange the muesli for the compote. We explained we have done this dozens of times and that we are willing to pay the difference. They said NO. In the very French tone. NO. So in order not to screw our celebration, we ended up ordering the normal petit-dejeuner with a compote we will not eat, and order 2 extra muesli to complete our order. Terrible backwards experience! Weibel should know better when it comes to...

Sunday around 9:00am. Understaffed, so took 15 mins to order and another 20 to get our food. We got the weibel breakfast plus a cafe au lait and a croissant. Croissant was terrible! Soft and bland, might as well have come from Costco. Coffee was fine. Weibel breakfast was disappointing; fruit salad was canned lychee and fresh pineapple - we thought that using canned and imported fruit was pretty crazy considering it's July, and a fresh produce market was going on outside, with bonkers delicious raspberries, cherries, and apricots literally in the square next to us. Also toast was cold and under-toasted. Before the lackluster breakfast, we ordered some pastries for our train ride later; haven't eaten those yet so can't say. The cakes were aesthetically beautiful but didn't try any.

Editing review - we had the pastries on the train. They were fine, so adding another star. I appreciate the owner's response on google... but I didn't critique whether the croissant was made with 100% butter or whether others liked it or not. I like crisp, flaky croissants - if you're the same, then these...