K36 (The Bar & Rooftop) — Restaurant in Kyoto

Nov,17 2021 The waitress who took care our table was terrible and did not have the service mind, as we saw.

We still remember her name.

Firstly, when we lightly asked her about the lighting event at Kiyomizu temple in Japanese, she answered (in Japanese) “I don’t know. I am not interested about this”. We were a bit in shock of how she used her language, but decided to let it go for once.

After that we asked the same question to another guy who speaks English. He replied as nicely as he could even though he didn’t know the details either. We were very satisfied by his respond. But, then the same waitress happened to pass by our table again, so the english speaking guy asked the waitress to confirm if she knew anything about the event. What she did was picking out her phone, saying (in Japanese) “it’s faster if you search it on the internet", and saying (in simplified english) "you have a phone? You know google? Search it in google?" while pointing at one of our phones on the table. Again we were shocked with both her verbal and non-verbal language.

So we decided to see the manager. Out of the sudden, she changed her behavior to be more helpful, and tried to start giving us information about the Kiyomizu Lighting event even though she just said that she did not care. We were not convinced by the behavior and still asked for the manager again. She, then, tried to deny and said that the manager was not there. We asked for any kinds of contact information but she said she did not know any.

After a while, we settled the bill and were ready to leave. We decided to ask another waiter for manager for the third time. Along the way to the elevator, that waitress came and accompanied us. She still insisted that she did not have the contact for the manager, and did not know where the manager was. It was that time that another waitress at the welcoming table overheard our conversation and gave us the contact card with email and phone number. She contacted the manager and said that the manager would be there soon. This contradicted to what the first waitress was denying.

The manager showed up and tried to apologize us as much as possible. How ever this, we feel, does not compensate our disappointment towards the expectation we have for the bar in a 5-star hotel. We liked the rest of the hotel so much that we even planned to spend some nights there on our next trip to Kyoto. But because of this happening, we do not think that will be going to happen due to that one...

We tried to book but they don’t accept reservations for people other than hotel guests. We walked in and they had loads of available seating but refused to seat us because they claimed to be ‘fully booked’. They then tried fobbing us off by suggesting that there was a minimum spend of JPY 25,000 per person! When I asked to speak to their manager to make a complaint, they begrudgingly seated us, showing their dissatisfaction when taking our order and interacting with us. I asked for umeshu and they told us that they didn’t have any umeshu, so I ordered something else. Someone else then asked for umeshu and voilà, they got umeshu. 10 minutes after we ordered, they started rushing us through that one round of drinks. It was only 8.30pm. Not long after that, they kicked us out. To add insult to injury, they taxed us JPY 5,401 in entry fees and service charges (for four people) in addition to the price of our drinks! Take a look at the attached receipt - the 10% service charge was charged on the entire bill, including the entry fee — a tax on a tax! These phony charges constituted 50% of our bill! All the ‘arigato gozaimasu’ in the world doesn’t change the fact that we (well-dressed international customers wanting only to spend our hard-earned money at their bar) were treated with utmost disrespect. Don’t be allured by the view - self-respect is more important. I recommend giving it a miss. I can see other recent 1-star reviews for this bar with others making similar comments. The manager seems to be replying to those comments to say ‘sorry’, but ‘sorry’ just isn’t good enough. They are upsetting lots of customers for no reason. It’s quite simple, really — if they don’t want to be welcoming and give international customers a good experience, they should choose a...

DISAPPOINTED and UNPROFESSIONAL TLDR: one of the staff was so rude. They clearly did not want us there. The manager told our party that it would be a “couple of hours” before we could be seated. And that we could take a picture of the view and leave. They forgot our beer and charged us twice for it and forgot our charcuterie board (we had to cancel it). And when we realized we were overcharged, the manager refused to help our waiter fix the charges.

Upon entering the rooftop bar, we saw a little line to be seated. When we asked how long the wait would be, the manager told us it would take a couple of hours and suggested we go somewhere else. He said we could take a picture of the view and leave. We decided to take some pictures and saw how fast the line was going. It was clear that it was not going to take “a couple hours” to seat us. In fact, we would’ve already been seated if we had just joined the waitlist right away. When we were seated, the staff was so inattentive to us, not once did they come check on us, we had to wave them down every single time we wanted to order or when they forgot something that we ordered. You could just tell that they wanted us to leave. I was with my family so I don’t understand why they treated us as if we were a rowdy crowd. One of our family members is from Japan and speaks fluent Japanese. He understood everything they were saying so he was able to relay everything to us and even he was appalled at how we were being treated. When our waiter tried to tell the manager that he messed up our order and needed help fixing it, the manager brushed him off and told him to handle it himself since it wasn’t his table. What kind of manager does that to their staff?! Truly disappointing because the place itself...