Botanic Garden — Restaurant in Zakynthos Municipality

Let's start with the beautiful garden they have and the pretty plating.. and now let's get to the things they should work on, in my opinion. As a solo diner, why do they aways assign you to the table where the most 'traffic' is? People eat late here and I came when there were only 3 tables occupied. I mean, as one person I won't be dining for 2 hours.. unless the food is slow of course. I asked if I could sit at a table further and the young boy had to check with one of the main waitresses. But yeah, luckily I didn't have to sit at the 'traffic' table. I ordered a non alcoholic drink, the arancini as a starter, fresh sea bass as a main, greens with mushroom as a side and lemon cheese cake for dessert. The starter came but the sauce with it was a bit sour... I was missing the 'spicy' in the spicy yogurt sauce (as the description said). Asked one of the (I presume) owners for a napkin. He brought me one very quickly and apologized several times. Oh right, still hadn't gotten my drink and as the main came I asked for it. The waiter that brought the food had one of the main waiters come over and I had to tell again I still hadn't gotten my drink yet. The sea bass was okay, nothing special.. the vegetables under the sea bass were not to my taste but the beetroot purée was very nice. The greens with mushrooms was okay too. After I finished the main and side my drink finally came. The lemon cheese cake was good except for the dry mint leaves flakes on top of it but that's just me, I don't like mint in/on food. I had high expectations because of the reviews but got disappointed.. especially for the price you pay. This was the most expensive meal I've had and you can easily eat cheap AND good in Zakynthos. The staff are almost robots, saying the necessary things without it feeling genuine. Except for the waitress with the dark hair and glasses. She even apologized for the service and I hadn't said anything about it yet but as a feedback I told her they should work on their communication. You feel (and hear) the chaos between them. When you dine alone you're just very observing. They charged me for the same drink twice, remember the one I had to ask for twice? The nice waitress fixed it quickly. It does feel like they're trying but maybe too forced. And in my...

Not sure where to start, I’m usually happy leaving a restaurant but this was an huge exception.

We arrived at 18:00 asked for a table for two, fully booked outside we where told. Took a table inside. Sat down, ordered drinks. All of a sudden they had a table outside, great! We moved tables 5 minutes after arrival.

Then we ordered starters, me and my wife wanted to share 4 to start with, since you never now how big the portions are. The waiter told us that the prefer to take the main course order at the same time. So we asked for a couple of minutes to go through the mains and had the impression that we got time to confirm starters/mains.

The waiter came back, we wanted to have 3 of the starters we said 3 minutes ago. Then he had already sent the order to the kitchen. Quite confusing since they wanted the starter/main order at the same time. But he cancelled that.

Food started to come in and it was good.

They missed one of the starters completely, we didn’t even bother to say anything.

I had ribs with crispy potatoes I didn’t get any sauce and it was quite dry, so I asked for sauce since it stood in the menu from another waiter. Then the guy we took the orders with came out starting to explain since I took the crispy potatoes he ”thought” I didn’t want sauce. (Waiters usually gives the customers his/hers thoughts in my opinion).

We ate up, asked another guy for the bill. Got to see the dessert menu from another waitress, said that we didn’t want dessert, then the guy whom we asked for the bill came with dessert menu. OMG! How hard can it be.

We finally got the bill, with the starter we cancelled, they took it off ofcourse.

We had all five of their waiters during a time period of 1,5 h. Some of them where really good, but unfortunatly two were not.

I was overall really dissatisfied with a visit I looked forward to, only because of the service and arrogance from two out of five waiters.

During the whole visit I didn’t feel welcomed and taken care of, then if the food was good or not sadly...

We had high expectations of this restaurant, but unfortunately these fell short. We were greeted promptly and given our first round of drinks quite quickly. We were seated in a nice area by the small pond in the corner. We then ordered our mains and were offered some bread to start. We quickly learned that bees / wasps would be a problem as we ate, as they were ever attracted to the flowers and bushes that are around. (We did expect an element of this being a garden place). The bread starter was quite nice. We didn’t wait long until the mains arrived, but when they did we were quite disappointed.

The portion size on the sea bass was pitiful. We had one small and thin fillet of bass, sat on a bed of what only can be described as tomato soup. There was not veg or side included with this, and would have been enough for a started if I am being completely honest. The BBQ ribs were more of a suitable portion but were 8 euros more expensive. The 3 langoustines were also disappointing as they had a small amount of meat on them and there was no water bowl to clean your fingers.

After we finished our mains we did tell the staff that we were disappointed from what we considered a more upmarket and expensive restaurant. After receiving this feedback the lady that served us was apologetic, and ended up giving us 4 free limoncellos and free desert. This did salvage some of the evening for us, however the bill still exceeded 135 euros.

The food itself was tasty, however I think there is a lot to learn for this restaurant, and they have focused heavily on design and profit of the place over the customer experience in terms of actually eating the food and what should be the...