Chez Lolo Et Gégé — Restaurant in Montpellier

We stumbled across La Morue purely by chance, strolling around the area. What a fantastic welcome by the owner, who is definitely an extrovert and a bit nuts. We felt like the most important guests of the day, and he went out of his way to offer us food options suitable for a vegan diet.

The summer salad with fruits was simply sensational - crunchy fresh salad items tempered with the sweetest, ripest fruit, balanced with a great vinaigrette and on-point seasoning. Fish soup was excellent - full of flavour and a good consistency. Mains of seared scallops with confit roasted vegetables and summer truffles was a triumph. A clam linguine was fresh, perfectly cooked, rich in flavour and substantial.

Pricing was robust but not excessive, and reflective of the very high standard of the food...

Despite earlier positive reviews this was a disaster from start to finish. We arrived when they were supposed to be open and told to come back in 10mins because they “weren’t ready yet”. The wait person appeared to be drunk. The calamari was great chunks of something covered in cool thick, stodgy batter. The clams in the main were mostly closed and the sauce dense and sticky with cream and no flavour. The crevettes were tasteless and sat on some greasy, mushy veg. The plates were badly chipped and we were sprayed with water (?) from an upstairs window while we were eating. When we asked to pay we were told we’d have to do shots with owner first (we declined) and the owner manually added up our food on a receipt pad before telling us verbally how much to pay. This is no way to...

I have absolutely no idea what happened here but it was singularly one of the worst service experiences I've had in a restaurant. I felt like the entire service staff must have quit just before they opened as no one working there had any idea what was going on or what wines they had. Everyone in the restaurant was waiting to either have their order taken or for a dish to ever so slowly arrive from a kitchen that must have been on the moon. Then there was a man who I assume was the owner bouncing around the room not doing anything useful and mainly giving out shots of liqueur that no one really wanted while they were waiting for their meal. It was an exceedingly strange experience that I care...