Arno Bistró Café Francais — Restaurant in Tegucigalpa

I must have gone on a particularly bad night for this restaurant. I've had better French food at my public high school cafeteria and better service at the DMV.

Upon arriving, I was delighted that the restaurant had taken attention to detail to such a deep level, as I smelled a distinctive "French" aroma. After a few seconds of trying to identify the smell, I realized it was the cigarette smoke coming from a man cosplaying as a chef, sitting at the entrance doing some paperwork chain-smoking Gitanes.

The burlesque recreation of trauma-inducing customer experience in France continued in the following seconds, as I was told by the maître d'hôtel that my table was "over there". Where exactly? Go figure. I walked the distance to my table, avoiding a dollar store plastic garbage bin carefully placed by the main passage to remind guests that they are, in fact, in Honduras, not in France. This restaurant cuts corners, but you shouldn't, because you'll knock a cheap garbage bin over.

A few seconds after sitting down, the waiter reproached me that I was sitting at the wrong table. I thought they were pushing the joke, nobody actually likes the mean French waiter cliché.

The poor waiter then proceeded to ask me if he could offer me something to drink, to which I agreed. "What?", he asked. "Well, I don't know. Offer me something", I replied. For some reason that poor fella must have messed up his alarm clock and thought he was going in for his shift at the SAR as he was obviously not aware he was waiting tables at a restaurant for the night. He could not muster a list of drinks this restaurant offered. Brought me the menu. That was the food menu. Too bad. I'll just guess.

That's when I started thinking maybe the restaurant isn't actually affecting a French air of unpleasantness, maybe they are just incompetent and abusing a weak competitive landscape to get by with terrible service and a complete lack of attention to detail.

For some reason, the culinary arts cosplayer decided to approach my table. Figuring he was French, I started talking French to him, which summoned the unavoidable and overdone "French pedant mocking a Quebec accent" cartoon character. It's 2022. I'm good here bud, I've seen that episode of "Être chauvin autour du monde".

After some more trials and tribulations, we received bread, crudités, butter, and a dip. The bread had seen better days (plural, for sure), and the crudités were old - viscous cucumber and greying carrots. The dip should have featured diced garlic, but the extreme pungency tells me the kitchen had decided to save some time and pulverize the garlic, turning the dip into an effective vampire repellent. The butter was local butter, which is a blind man's portrait of butter. Looks and tastes like butter if you have no eyes and taste buds. A turmeric-coloured unstable emulsion at room temperature. Real butter is churning in its grave.

The poor waiting staff were engaged in a burlesque recreation of Louis de Funès' "Le Grand Restaurant", as they obviously had been trained for about as long as the kitchen cared to microwave the meals. Pouring my glass first instead of my wife's, piling up dishes on the table, not knowing what meal was whose.

The potato soup was the highlight of the night, revealing no ill-intention throughout. Yes, it was bland, lukewarm and generally uninteresting, but that is a huge advantage over the tajine which closely resembled diarrhea, with a sauce that had broken down into a water phase and an oil phase following the freezing and thawing cycle this restaurant plagues French gastronomy's reputation in Tegucigalpa with, and a damaged meat structure due to the same lazy decision. Let's not mention the chewy pork smothered in a Roquefort sauce, in which the only distinguishable taste was butyric acid.

This stunning experience (in the Taser sense, not the Megan Fox sense) relieved me of about $100, which is $200 more than...

The food was exquisite.. Very tastefully and well prepared. The atmosphere was beyond pretty, I was on a date and it was just the perfect setting; however, my boyfriend ordered a specific juice and was brought something else when we brought it up the lady acted like if we didn't explain well and got defensive, then we saw that the drink had a little bug floating on top. We took it out.

Lastly the lady gave brought the plates, but did not bring my boyfriends appetizers and when he brought It up instead of apologizing she was blaming him and did not even offer to bring it to him right away until I did, she did not seem please to serve anyone and give off that welcoming feature needed in these places.

Besides that we had a ver enjoyable calm dinner...

The best all around quality restaurant in Tegus. The waiter listened and put the customer first. The environment was very relaxing. My wife ordered la sopa marinera which tasted like her grandmother made it and I ordered the seafood fettuccini alfredo. It has the perfect amount of pasta and the seafood was amazing. I got to know the owner and asked him more about his passion for making food from scratch. They even make their own...