Gaffel am Dom - Brauhaus — Restaurant in Cologne

I don’t like being unfair with an establishment, so to be clear: Food was nice and the place is enjoyable. The service was the worst I ever got in Germany by far. Bear with me.

My father-in-law, cousin and I arrived at the table located outside by the sidewalk around lunch time, a bit after my wife, mother-in-law and cousin sat down with the kids and ordered enough food and drinks for themselves. It was about then that my mother-in-law decided to share with everyone a food treat from our home land she had prepared herself. It was only enough for each to try a small piece (maybe the size of a quarter apple each). Now, I did think there might be an issue with having outside food at the restaurant table, even though it truly was just a taster each, but before I could even bring it up, the waiter arrived at the table corner with a huge (clearly ironic) smile on his face and said very loudly on a volume people from all tables around us heard: “Really!? Can you please stop THAT?” The sudden violent tone obviously caught everyone by surprise, but as I had already anticipated this could have been an issue, I quickly told him I was sorry and explained it was just some homemade snack we wanted to try and that we would stop it regardless. Maybe a minute or two afterwards I had not noticed that one of our table members had not yet totally finished eating his piece of the snack and was again taken aback by the now unironic shouting done by the same waiter. He was now shouting across the sidewalk while standing a couple of tables away and this time he managed to bring every person’s in the vicinity attention to us and purposefully shame us by yelling: “Can you stop eating that now?” To which once more, with the intent of not causing trouble, I simply said we were sorry and told my elderly non-English speaker father-in-law that he should not eat that food anymore. He simply had not fully understood what happened before, presumably because it seemed like such an overreaction for such a small happening. Now, up till that point I thought the waiter had simply made a very bad decision to rudely communicate something within his right to his customers when there was a perfectly quieter and more polite way to do so that would not have put us on the spot while achieving the exact same objective. The main issue came afterwards, when I realised that waiter was just determined to mistreating us in every way possible. This was made clear to me when the tables were turned and he was in the wrong, but instead of acknowledging it, he acted with spite. I called him to order food and drinks for the rest of our party that arrived later to which he very loudly pointed out: “For all these people, you are only ordering this!??” to which I replied calmly, but very confused: “But we had already placed a bigger order, I am not sure what is happening”. He then quickly started looking at his tablet and realised I was right and I swear he literally looked in my direction and mouthed very quietly: “Sorry” with another big ironic smile on his face. I then thought “Ok, so he has difficulty with apologising, but when he wants to try and humiliate us he tries to be as loud as possible.” After all that, he served all of us the wrong food and removed it all without saying I am sorry once, then served my mother-in-law a salad full of mixed sauce which we had ordered on the side and he had taken the order himself. When questioned about it, he simply looked with a straight face: “It is on the menu like that, so the kitchen doesn’t make it separetely.” I then politely said: “You should have told us then, she cannot have it like this as she has allergies, we would not have ordered it had we known. Can we either get it changed or returned, please?” He literally grabbed the plate and waved it at the rest of my family while asking: “Anyone else wants to have it?” and dropped it at the table refusing to take it back.

The mistreatment continued all the way to check out and I swear we did not stop being civilised with him once. It truly was a...

Walking in, there's no greeting and we are confused. We find a server to ask if we are supposed to seat ourselves and she politely agrees to find us a seat. Did that but didn't clean the food off of the table from previous guests. The place didn't look dirty enough for that to be a standard practice.

The menu is very friendly to English-speakers, but the drink menu is not. I had to use 3 different German translators to get the right translation for the herbal, peach, and the other shot on the menu. I'm not someone who enjoys beer, so i ordered a "glass of tap water" which seemed to confuse the server, so i tried to ask for a glass of "table water" and she said "still water?" While nodding, as if she got what i meant. So i reluctantly agreed, hoping it was tap, but instead got a small bottle of water. The lemon beer was enjoyed by two people in my party that sometimes like darker beers. It has a very strong initial lemon taste, followed by a very strong taste of hops. I did taste a sip of it because i like lemon, and it was surprising at first. I wish i did enjoy the flavor of hops, but it definitely overtakes the palette. When we ordered, we specifically chose food on the menu that came with mustard, because we love German mustard. None of the good came with the mustard we ordered, and all of it seemed to have a lack of seasoning.

The meat loaf was good-similar to fried Spam, with German cabbage and delicious fried potatoes and onions.

The meat ball was very bland and a little undercooked.

The bread and cheese we tried to get with two soups for an appetizer but it didn't come until after the meal did, but it was decently good cheese with stale bread.

The Royale schnitzel with Späzle and gravy was very tasty. We enjoyed that a lot.

We had to wave and flag down the servers when there was a mistake because they do not check after a few minutes to make sure you are happy with the way things came out from the kitchen, the only ask right away before you have time to notice what is wrong. We seemed to annoy them when doing this, but we did tip well.

I would come back here with someone that likes beer and knows a little bit more German than us. Perhaps someone that could at least understand more than 5 menu...

맨 밑에 요약 있습니다.

The server is very rude.

When I entered the store, I couldn't get directions to my seat right away, so I had to ask in person before I was able to sit down.

And as I was ordering beer and food, a waiter and a man who looked 20 years older than me appeared. The man suddenly sat down in front of me, and the waiter said he brought him here because he wanted to connect me and the man. A man who looks 20 years older. Was he a member of the server's aged bachelor's club?

Because the man's complexion looked like he was already drunk, I couldn't respond strongly for fear that he might use violence against me. When my expression turned sour, they both laughed, said it was just a joke, and disappeared.

I think the fact that I was the only Asian at the table around me had an influence on the server’s ‘joke.’ I felt like I had traveled to Germany 90 years ago.

Unfortunately, the server was the one in charge of the section I was sitting in, and I had to keep running into him. And when paying, the server asked me if I wanted to tip. When I asked if he was serious, the server explained what a tip was to me as if he didn't even remember what had happened before and as if I didn't know the definition of a tip. Did I really not know what a tip was?

And Haksen is very hard. I feel like my tooth will break.

지금까지 잘 드시고 온 분들은 다행이지만 인종차별이 없지는 않으니 가실 분들은 유의하세요. 아무일도 안 일어난다면 다행이고요. 한국분들 보시라고 한국어로도 올리고 싶은데 너무 길어서 생략했습니다.

**세줄요약: 서버가 주옥같다. 학센...