Mat Bar — Restaurant in Reykjavik

I have a theory. If a restaurant gets a lot of praise in social media or anywhere in internet, it’s the beginning of the end. The demand just becomes too overwhelming. At least that is how I feel after our trip to Reykjavik. I thought I was very clever when I made reservations for the weekend; I wanted to make sure that we would have great spots to eat because if you start to look for a table on friday evening, you are massively too late. My decisions were of course based on Google, Tripadvisor, World of mouth, and food bloggers. One thing I was sure of though; no Michelin for us. Partly because of my wife’s restricted diet but also because I can’t stand the stuffiness and the ridiculous 6-15 course marathons. Well, all reservations were disappointing. I would rather have had a good hot dog. Luckily the angels rescued us. On saturday when we were walking and did not even feel hungry yet, we noticed Mat Bar. I sometimes have a sixth sense of restaurants and we decided to pop in and have lunch. And boy - finally something that made my heart (read belly) sing. Everything was perfect; great food and ”beverages”, super staff and nice interior. I mean they had housemade fermented salsa with the tacos. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a taco place. That was just something on their lunch menu among other things. Anyways, we exited happily with the realisation that there are still people who love to prepare excellent food, because as they say; it takes the same amount of time to make good food than bad, so why not make good. We went there one more time and were just as satisfied. I hope this review does not...

Avoid. This is a money machine because of the fine reviews of Google and TripAdvisor. Do not get me wrong … the taste of the very small dishes at normal price portions is excellent – but … it is just getting customers in and out as fast as possible. They could even do it faster without waiting time for serving and taking orders. It was very loud from the bar / waiting area as they placed customers without reservation there waiting for a table or eating there … all tables are normally booked. We pre-booked – waited 30 minutes for our drink that we ordered by stopping the barkeeper coming along. Then we waited 20 minutes more until the waitress took our order in … and then we got food within 5-10 minutes and could have done this (really) small portions within 10 minutes – but we needed more bread for them and asked for it by trying to get attention from the waitress (she was not monitoring the guests; we had to get her attention). After 15 minutes we asked what the status of the bread was. Status: forgotten … 5 minutes later the bread arrived, we ate up and left. It can be that this day a waitress was sick … because we think that the prices and the quantity of guests should not be on the shoulders of one nice lady, but there should have been one more. Or the bartender should have entered “the fight” to help her serve the guests paying the same price as in other restaurants with 3 or 4 people serving for this number of guests. Actually, it was very tasty fast-food in small portions that took a lot more time than fast-food … not to prepare them – but in waiting time...

We heard about Mat Bar from the Eater list of best restaurants in Reykjavik, and from the very positive Google reviews. Overall our experience was just ok.

Our experience hopefully was just a one-off for the restaurant. It was clear they were short-staffed and had a new server on the floor. We were totally understanding to this situation, this was not ideal and we could tell the entire staff was pretty stressed. But unfortunately the service did suffer.

After we sat down, we had to ask for water about 4 times, and took maybe 20 minutes for a server to take our order. This really provided a poor first impression and sets some negative expectations for the rest of your experience.

The rest of the night, the service was honestly really clunky. We had to be very proactive about flagging people down and asking for anything and everything. This seemed to be the case with every table around us as well.

The food was good. Wasn’t mind-blowing, but it was solid.

Overall, our experience did not meet our expectations. It was a miss. However, from all the other raving reviews on Google, it does seem like this was due to staffing issues unique to our visit and would likely...