Restaurant De Beren Alphen aan den Rijn — Restaurant in Alphen aan den Rijn

Unfortunately, I don’t speak Dutch. I was with my son and a friend who does speak Dutch. I placed the order in English. I specifically asked whether the food was spicy and mentioned that it was for a child. The waiter assured me it wasn’t. However, when the food arrived, it turned out to be spicy, and my hungry son couldn’t eat it.

My Dutch-speaking friend raised the issue with the waiter, who then said that they had a children’s menu. When my friend asked why she hadn’t offered it from the start, the waiter replied, “Because they don’t speak Dutch.”

The service I would expect is this: if you have a children’s menu and your visitors don’t speak Dutch, it’s worth at least pointing it out. Guests can easily translate it with Google Translate. And if you’re aiming to provide really good service, you might ask what the child would like and suggest some suitable options from the menu. It’s very simple.

In addition, the menu itself offered quite a poor selection. Unfortunately, our favourite restaurant nearby was closed, so we decided to try this one instead.

The whole experience was disappointing...

Poor service level, limited number of waiters, only 2 available for the entire restaurant. Our food took approximately 20 minutes to arrive and we only ordered sandwiches which was rather long for only sandwiches.This was lunch time.

After ordering other drinks, we asked the male waiter for a glass of tapwater and were declined and he said he can only serve us Spa Blauw. I thought this was rather ridiculous as my family and I have been to numerous other restaurants including the adjacent Woodstone Pizza (next to De Beren) where they serve tap water. Sometimes its personal, however, not everyone wishes to drink cold bottled water.

This was the second time we had been to De Beren in Alphen and in conclusion both times were poor and delayed service.

If more staff are employed to assist with time delays in serving customers and the staff and management a bit flexible on serving tap water this would improve the reviews of...

We went for dinner to De Beren after a year or so, and we were impressed with how the quality of this restaurant has decreased. We ordered some dishes to share, and realized that the amount of food is incredibly small (I understand the effect of inflation, but this was a bit exaggerated). Just to give an example, we paid 8€ for a dish, called "empanadas", which was just 4 tiny mini-empanadas that you can find in the section of frozen food from the supermarket. I consider it a bit too expensive to pay 2€ for each of them at the restaurant. It was the same with some stuffed fries that we ordered, pretty expensive but we got a really small bowl... and the same happened with the rest of the dishes. In the end, we paid a total of 60€ for 2 people, and we left the restaurant still hungry. It's really sad to see De Beren losing quality like this, as it was a very nice restaurant some years ago. We are not planning to...