Le Drakkar — Restaurant in Bayeux

Food itself was of mixed quality but overall fine. The real problem was with how we were treated.

In terms of food, the escargot starter was great. The tripe à la mode Caen was rather good though over-salted. The steak was sad: even when ordered à point (which is supposed to be something like rare or medium rare), it turned out closer to cuit (medium) or even bien-cuit (well done) in parts. The marrow bone that came with the steak was much better than the steak. We also had a raclette tartine, which was kind of meh. Overall, the food certainly was not amazing, but it was fine.

Our experience in the restaurant though was quite bad.

For context, we arrived around 6:45pm on a Wednesday. We have three children, all under ten, the youngest who is three, but all of whom are varied eaters and eat the same food that we eat.

When seating us, the restaurant staff was more than eager to seat the five of us at a table clearly intended for four adults, and noted our three young kids could squeeze onto the bench (which was fine with us). We were also seated nearby to another party of three, at a table of the exact same size.

However, come time to order, suddenly the idea that we weren’t going to be ordering five main dishes proved to be a big problem. To be clear, we attempted to order: a dozen escargot, a carafe of wine, a bottle of water, juice and sodas for our kids, the steak-plus-marrow-bone dish (called an “XXL” board, and priced at twice that of other mains), and the tripe main—and for what it’s worth, we had been planning ahead to our dessert order as well. This apparently was insufficient. We were told we could not come into the restaurant and take up space for five (recall, this after they squeezed us into a table for four, right by a party of three at a same-sized table) and order so little. You should order a kids menu, we were told. I replied we didn’t want a kids menu; we prefer our kids to eat the same as us, not chicken nuggets (or pasta, which was the other option). So we said ok, we aren’t particularly hungry, but we can order one more dish, the raclette tartine. The server looked us expectantly: how many kids menus? I again said we didn’t want it, and the server went off, talked to someone, and another server came by, and asked us what we wanted to order. I asked, should I repeat the whole order? No, they just wanted to know how many kids menus we wanted. We finally said ok, we will get a kids menu with chicken nuggets. They looked at our kids and pushed for more, but I said have we not ordered enough food? They finally relented.

Not only was this frustrating, it was inefficient, with our order not finalized until perhaps 40min after we’d arrived. Ironically also perhaps, while the restaurant extracted some extra revenue in our initial order, my wife and I were so bothered by our experience that we made a point of minimizing the remainder of our order: no more wine, no more drinks, no dessert (except a scoop of ice cream, to go along with the two scoops in the kids menu, so that each kid could get one). If this was about the restaurant making enough money, then penny-wise, pound-foolish, I would say.

I could understand perhaps being treated this way if we had come into a restaurant with a large party and took up some tables and just tried to place a skimpy order of a few starters and some drinks or something like that. But for our single table, we had already attempted to place an order for over 115€—not even counting the additional drinks or dessert we would’ve ordered later in the meal—and again not taking any more space than the party of three seated at the table right next to ours. The treatment we received in response is just absurd. One of our kids days later was still asking us questions about “why were the people in that restaurant so mean?”, to which we were left scratching our heads without a good answer.

Anyway, we didn’t go to Bayeux for the food, and food options in Bayeux aren’t like in Paris, but I certainly can imagine there are better...

TL:DR shite experience, felt unwelcome from the start.

We had such a strange experience here. We arrived right at opening time along with other tables of people. But immediately we felt unwelcome, just something felt off. When the waitress finally came to ask for our order, us not being French speakers sort of hesitated and the waitress just walked off which we found weird. Then we ordered some drinks, champagne, a Normandy spritz & two soft drinks for the kids. When a sprite we didn’t order arrived we said oh no we meant the spritz and the waitress insisted that the sprite was the spritz - fair enough we don’t speak French & maybe she didn’t speak English. So we cleared it up and got the correct drink and said we’d keep the sprite as well (even though we didn’t want it)

Then she asked us for food orders. We said we’d like a couple starters & she told us we had to order our whole food order at once for the kitchen. We said ok we’ll only have the starters & she told us “it’s not a bar it’s a restaurant you have to order food” and we said we are ordering food just only a little bit & she basically told us no that want option. So we said ok fine cancel the food and bring the bill & she did! Keep in mind the restaurant was no where near full, it was about 18:30pm on a Tuesday… we had 2 kids with us so not likely to be occupying the table all night without spending money!? We wanted to order a bottle of champagne. It was just such a strange experience… ended up a happy situation though as we ended up at The Oasis and had the lovely relaxed evening we wanted.

Ironically their menu says the whole team welcomes you & we literally felt so unwelcome from the moment we walked in! Maybe we did something wrong unknowingly but we’ve been in France for a week at this point and not had anything...

We just finished a dinner meal here and it was seriously lacking. We had the 19£ / 3 choices deal. For the starter we both had onion soup which was nothing special and tasted bland & overly watered down. Next for entree I had a salmon dish which came with rice and spinach. The spinach was so over cooked it was just a blop of mushy mess. I wondered if it came from a can. Salmon was ok but had no seasoning or much flavor. Rice was maybe the quick-cook kind. My husband had ham, fries, carrots. The carrots I’m sure were from a can. So over cooked they had the consistency of baby food. The ham was covered in some sort of gravy that didn’t compliment it. Dessert was good but not great. We had lemon tart and caramel custard. Service was average. I’d give it 1.5 stars if I could based on dessert. But really a...