Continental Restaurant — Restaurant in Reims

I try to only give positive reviews, so this is a little challenging for me but I need to share our lunch experience at the Continental Restaurant in Reims, France.

First I will mention that Reims is the heart of the Champagne region. It’s a beautiful thriving city that has amazing historical sites as well as being a modern city. It’s beautiful!

We had 3 hours between trains and my husband booked us a lunch reservation for the last seating of the day. We were celebrating my birthday and our anniversary. We arrived a little late, due to the train, and while there was only one other guest in the restaurant, they did haved declined to seat us because we were late at the end of service, but they didn’t. After checking with the chef, the server sat us at a nice outside table.

From there, it all sort of went down hill. The service was spotty, meaning we waited long periods between receiving menus, then long time to take our wine order, even longer to take our food order, and they brought the plate before clearing our first course.

They did not ask us if we wanted another glass of wine with our plate, which we did, so to ensure getting a glass while our food was hot and fresh, I had to get up, walk inside, find the server, and then order our selection so it could be brought out immediately. While I was trying to make my choice of wines to have with our plate, the manager decided to come over to manger-splain how a wine list works. After 20+ years in the wine industry, I let them know I was familiar with wine lists. However what neither the manger not the server bothered to do was apologize for neglecting our table and not caring if we received 5star service at what is to be the premier hotel and restaurant in that city. I have had better service at a Burger...

The place looks fancy, food was pretty good. We were a table of 6 and most of us had the Continental menu. We were missing some vegetables and I felt the dessert was nothing special at all, but fine. Now, the service was bad. And bad in a way that that there was simply no service. It was not a busy evening, you could see from time to time that there were a lot of different faces of waiters supposed to be working there. But for every. single. thing. we needed to call someone instead of them coming on their own. We bought 3 (!) bottles of wine over the evening, each of them around 200€. The sommelier was very nice and friendly and poured the wines in the beginning, but after that first pouring we had to pour it ourselves every single time. Empty plates stayed on our table for at least 10 minutes before cleared. We had to ask for water constantly. The cheese course could have been amazing, but the waitress was not able to properly present the cheeses, their characteristics. I'm not even talking about the lack of English here (that seems to be normal), but she simply didn't know. And I'm also not even starting with the fact that not one single glass was taken form the table during the course of the meal. Even the little table where she had placed the tray with the cheeses was left next to our table. An evening that could have been great was spoiled by the irritation of not getting any service at all, not understandable for that...

In Reims for the second time in 3 months due to our great first experience we decided to try out the Continental Restaurant again for dinner. The restaurant is located inside the Grand Hotel Continental, has a warm mid century style decor and a variety of seating arrangements. We selected again a table at the window side. From the menu card we selected the Euro 27 and the Euro 42 menus with a selection of Salade de lentilles roses de Champagne-ardenne et jambon de Reims/ Filet de Maquereau fume, pommes de terre fondantes et moutarde/ Tarte tropezienne a la fleur d'oranger AND Le foie gras marine au Ratifia, compotee d'oignons/ Le filet de beiuf tataki, ecrase de Nasca au wasabi/ Le pain perdu brioche amande douce Food was exquisite and well presented, served in a timely manner and at the right temperature (which unfortunately isnt always the case). Definitely a venue where we will return again when in Reims and highly recommended to those after an exciting culinary experience at great...