La Flamme — Restaurant in Paris

Terrible Experience at La Flamme - Avoid at All Costs!

My honest review: I had an absolutely horrible experience at La Flamme last night. From start to finish, the service was abysmal, and the waiter was incredibly unprofessional.

First off, the waiter forgot one of our dishes and then had the audacity to claim we only ordered six dishes instead of seven. When we pointed out her mistake, she made up an absurd excuse saying the dish took five hours to cook and needed just ten more minutes. Seriously?

The timing of our dishes was another disaster. They brought our food out in three separate batches, with 5-10 minute intervals between each. This meant some of us had to eat our food cold, while others had to wait and watch us eat. This is completely unacceptable in any restaurant.

Adding to the disgust, I witnessed our brunette, overweight waitress scratch her breast inside her bra before serving us and other customers. This is not only unprofessional but also incredibly unhygienic.

To make matters worse, the restaurant didn’t provide us with menus and expected us to scan a QR code written in French. None of us could read it, and we had to guess our orders. They also didn’t give us enough forks and knives. Despite being told the table was set for the correct number of people, only half of us had utensils. How are we supposed to eat without forks and knives?

To top it all off, the food was just okay but the price was way too expensive. They even charged us for tap water! The toilets were disgusting, and for some reason, there were two rooms next to the bathrooms with signs saying "surveillance video" on the doors.

Overall, La Flamme was a nightmare. The service was terrible and the food was okay, the waiter was unprofessional and unhygienic, and the entire dining experience was ruined by their incompetence. I would never recommend this place to anyone. Save your money and go...

We hit this spot as it was close to the Arch and that was on our agenda for the day. I expected to pay higher prices given the location and was ok with that, especially after I spotted the duck con fit and French onion soup on the menu. Weather permitting, there’s a view of the Arch from the outdoor seats as well.

We ordered the roasted chicken, french onion soup , duck con fit and pizza margarita. The pizza was great. The FOS was OK. The duck and chicken were also just OK, a tad on the dry side. All were lacking ever so slightly on salt; however, I’m probably a little desensitized to salt as an American. That said, having lived in Europe for several years now, I’d still say the food was overall lacking in salt even by the European scale.

We ate inside as the weather was very windy with occasional showers. Getting tucked into a corner table probably had a lot to do with the poor, slow service we received. We had to repeat our request for water 3 times and finally got it delivered after an hour. The pizza was also initially forgotten until we reminded the server about it several minutes after the rest of the food had arrived. We got a couple of milk shakes and a Crêpe (included with the children’s menu). The shakes were probably a little more akin to smoothies but they were tasty. Just don’t expect a thick, American style milkshake when you order one and you won’t be disappointed (we didn’t expect that, so we weren’t disappointed). The kids also had hot chocolates to start (we spoiled them) and there was a very generous and fun portion of whipped cream on top, so they enjoyed that.

Overall, it was fine. But you can probably find a better option in the area for...

Waitress was on an up-selling mission tonight. 4 times she tried to get us to order something more expensive. One member of our party ordered a main course which was not what he thought it was, and changed his order within a couple of minutes, our waitress was not impressed at having to change this despite admitting she'd not yet put the order through, can only assume this was because the dish was significantly cheaper than originally requested. She then told us we would have to get our starters and main courses together as the food takes a long time to cook...1 onion soup(salty), 2 pizzas, 2 coq au vin, and a shepherd's pie? All of which arrived within 5 minutes. Had to leave the soup until I'd eaten my coq au vin as it would have been cold by the time the soup was cool enough to eat. We ordered sauvignon blanc (white wine), our waitress tried to get us to buy St Émilion (red and expensive ) instead. Then just brought and poured us the red anyway. She then had the audacity to get annoyed when we asked for what we ordered. When we came to pay, she hovered over us while we checked the bill (a wise move, after our experience), took pains to tell us that tips should and could be added to our payment, and generally fawned over us until payment was made. Yes, we were tourists in a touristy area, thankfully we spoke enough French to avoid being scammed, and just ended up frustrated and disappointed. Cafe L'Éoile 1903 right next door was much...