Farniente Plage — Restaurant in Arles

One to avoid! We ordered the full seafood platter for two persons (90 Euros), with lobster, crab, prawns, mussels, oysters and razor clams. It arrived in impressive style piled up on a curved wooden board.

We were very excited at first, until we looked more closely at the quality of the products. To start, the aioli was lumpy with a skin on top, the oysters were nice but not as nice as the ones we had earlier in town, the mussels seemed slimy and raw although the shells were open. The prawns were very dirty inside and we had to ask for a water bowl to clean them. In general everything was watery and lacking in flavour, so we suspected things had been frozen or were a bit old. The lobster was overcooked to being tough and chewy, and the claw meat had gone mushy. All this we were prepared to accept, thinking I guess it wasn't as good as the other reviews suggested, perhaps a bad night. We started to try the crab claws, which were watery and tasteless... And then we turned over the top crab shell which was hiding a liquid pile of still half frozen overcooked mushy dirty looking "crab". You could not even tell where the white meat was supposed to be.

At this point, we became very concerned about the quality of the seafood we'd already eaten and refused to eat anymore. The kitchen offered us more prawns, but there was no way we wanted any more of their seafood!! There was very little apology or acknowledgement from the kitchen or management, only the young table waiter apologised. We refused to pay anymore than 50% of the bill which was generous in the circumstances (they didn't even try to dispute) and left. We feel duped ...perhaps the thought tourists wouldn't know any better or just wanted to palm off old stock on someone... It's so dangerous to serve old bad quality seafood, and for the price you are expected to pay... A very disappointing seafood experience in this lovely town.

Now an anxious wait to see if we ended up with more than we...

I had lunch here this week and it was the worst meal I have ever had.  No care was taken to prepare it and it was blatantly over-priced and served by a waitress who was abrupt in her manner, almost rude in fact and totally unhelpful when I asked about vegetarian options.

As a vegetarian, there were only 2 options on the menu I could have and both very expensive for what they were.  I had no choice but to order the Declinaison de crudites at 22 Euros.  Obviously I understood that this was raw vegetables but what I was given was quite simply a basket of vegetables you would get if you bought your weekly groceries from a market.  Whole vegetables, impossible to eat except with your hands like an animal.

No time or care had been given to this dish.  Clearly they do not want to cater for vegetarians and this dish was a blatantly over-priced insult to vegetarians who also would like something nice to eat and not a basket of whole raw vegetables.

It was shocking in its presentation, particularly given the ridiculous price of 22 Euros for something that would have cost almost nothing.

This is the first time I have complained about a meal in my life, it has now been 4 days and still no reply from the restaurant to my...

We arrived at 17:00 and were asked to pay 20 Euros each to use a transat until 18:30 when they close the beach area. We were though offered as an alternative to sit in the lounge area.

Ok... We sat in the almost empty lounge area.

We then ordered 2 mojitos and a big bottle of water (1.5L, 6.5 euros). They denied us the bottle of water because we were sitting in the lounge area. Big bottles are only available in the beach and restaurant area. We could only buy small 25cl bottles of water at 4 euros! That's 16 euros for 1L, the price of a bottle of wine in some restaurants around.

Farniente seems to be a very good example on the effect of tourism in a lot of places: lower the quality,...