La Primavera Ristorante — Restaurant in Reykjavik

Worst restaurant in Reykjavík

Hi there, my name is Jökull, Im a local of Reykjavík and I’ve been to most of the restaurants in the city. I can unequivocally say La Primavera is the worst one.

A sudden decision to go out on a friday, most of downtown is already booked, so I look for something near the docks. 4.5 stars, italian, what could possibly go wrong?

The menu didn’t look like a menu for italian food, it was one of those menus where they list 3 of the ingredients as a course name. We ponder this conundrum a bit and I jokingly say: “there’s a kebab place close by you know…”

Bread was boring, tasteless, no salt provided. Italy is known for a it’s warm fresh white bread, why am I being served cold coarse sourdough?

Appetiser was a salad to share, not because we’re that kind of people but because that’s the only starter that sounded like food. It was the most chaotic and uninviting salad I have ever had, with peaches and whipped ricotta it was only one ingredient away from being a nice desert.

The main courses: Carbonara and a shellfish pasta. Okay this is getting a bit ridiculous, two more bland and unappealing dishes, I make better carbonara at home and I’m not that good in the kitchen. Honestly the AI could do a better job, it’s carbonara, how complicated could it be?

Im not sure what to say about the seafood pasta, it looked very bad, and neither tasted like seafood nor pasta. For reference it’s the black mess in a bowl in the accompanying photos.

For these 3 courses and two drinks I paid 178 dollars. No discount even though we barely touched the food.

The waiters knew we didn’t like the food, but the didn’t approach us and ask. We got up to pay and told them we were not happy and they said sorry, and charged the full amount.

I wont tell you where to go to explore the culinary city of Reykjavík, there’s so many decent places. But please, go anywhere else than La Primavera. Reykjavík is expensive, and quality is generally really high.

We had a kebab on the way home. Unfortunate...

Out of our whole trip, I could say without a doubt that this was the worst restaurant in all of Reykjavík. It wasn’t busy and food still took over an hour to be served, which was missing items and was horrible.

We got the seafood linguine and veal carbonara, which was hilariously bland, seriously a block of salt would’ve tasted better. Linguine was alright but after waiting for over an hour it still was missing the lobster - which came after we were done eating. Our server only checked in on us three times before the food arrived and never came back. One time for water, second for wine, third for bread and appetizer, then a whole hour until a food runner brought our meals. I mean that veal felt like it was stale, not seasoned, and old - it wasn’t even hot! Had to comment again it was pretty funny how bad it was.

The other issue was that the restaurant was unbelievably hot, even in my thin sweater I was sweating which caused me and my wife to be very uncomfortable.

They apologized for the long waits and could see how upset we were and still charged full price ($184). We even rushed home from our day trip to Kirkjufell to make our reservation, and like we said many times we should’ve...

Not the same restaurant as was presented to Phil Rosenthall in his “someone feed Phil” TV show. There is no homemade pasta. Food lacks flavors and when we could not even eat one of the dishes (yes it was that bad) they still charged us for the dish. Completely unfriendly to foreigners, so unless you’re Icelandic, don’t bother going there. They consistently served other local customers first. Just a strange vibe that we never encountered anywhere else on this beautiful and...