Le Jardin des Peintres — Restaurant in Lisieux

I seriously thought i was dreaming. And it has nothing to do with the very charming layout of the restaurants which we were attracted to. Coupling that with the kids menu available, looked like the perfect choice for a nice saturday evening dinner for me and my family. Unfortunately the dream became a nightmare. Besides the average food quality (obviously you have high expectations when dining in france) the lowlight came when the owner (i shall refer to him as the gentleman) started shouting at mi kids guilty of sitting on an empty side of the restaurant playing with the little salt packs (that i had previously sealed in order for them not to spread any salt around). From what i can recall the gentleman took abrubtly the salt out of my kids hands, shouting something like “take your children, this is a restaurant, not a playground”. Not happy about the performance so far (i was trying to calm him down while not scaring my kids), the gentleman continued “this is france, not italy”.. so.. in italy restaurant owners don’t shout at their paying customers?? (How poor of them..). And by the way, i actually live in the netherlands, where kids are very welcome in restaurants where kids menus are available (my 2 cents is.. if you don’t want kids in your restaurant, don’t put a kids menu available). Inspired by this performance (it did remind me of a movie. Can’t seem to recall which one), and basically being pushed out of the restaurant, we had no choice other than paying the bill and head to the closest ice cream place to let my kids have that promised ice cream which was included in the kids menu (and which we paid for fully) we could not get as we were basically kicked out of the restaurant..unfortunately.. it was...

We've eaten really fine over here. It's not fantastic, but good. When you look at price/quality it's really great. We've eaten mussels and they tasted really fine and it was even for me a big meal! The French fries were not really good but tasted okay.

It's a lot cheaper then in the really crowded and too touristic centre. We've paid €10,90 for the mussels and drinks are from about €3,-. The plat du jour is only available when you're eating during lunch and is about €10,-

Keep in mind that they don't speak English over there so you have to do your best in French or use Google translate!

We wouldn't hesitate to...

Great service from a very friendly waitress, and the mussels were pretty good. But the fish & chips - oh my god. It was a piece of cheap frozen fish from a supermarket, for which they charged around 21 euros. It took an awfully long time for the food to come (much longer than other tables), so I wonder if they'd run out of proper fish & had to send someone to the shop for that. It has lots of glowing reviews so we were obviously just unlucky. Really...