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 horrendous experience.