Buenos Aires — Restaurant in Amstelveen

I normally prioritize food over anything in a restaurant experience, so let’s start there.

This is not an authentic Argentinian place, is clearly an adaptation to local customs, which I’m ok with… but don’t promote it as an authentic Argentinian place. The meat is good quality, but very poorly treated and cooked, with definitely minimal to no grill/smoked flavor as you would expect from a “typical Argentinian parrilla”.

Empanadas are ok, but 95% meat, almost no veggies, making it a bit dry but ok. The chorizo is a bit sad, and they don’t provide even a tiny bit of bread to make a custom small choripán. It’s a bit dry and resembles a bit the Argentinian style but again, no grill/smoked flavor, so quite sad. Then, we ordered an entraña, cooked medium, 500g which costs 50 nice euros. In short, felt like a scam. We were 2 and they brought it in 2 pieces, one for each. One of those was ok (medium rare tho, but still ok) and the other one was just raw, not even rare or whatever, just plainly raw. When we asked them to cook it a bit further, they took the plate (no apologies, not even acting a surprised face, nothing) and brought it back later in a horrible looking dish without a couple of veggies, more meat, etc that was in the previous plate. And again, meat is good quality from origin, but not properly cooked and felt very far from grilled in typical Argentinian style.

With all this situation we just asked for the bill and payed… maybe an apology? Maybe a discount? Maybe a desert on the house? Not really, nothing. And it’s basically what this place is supposed to do right: grill meat. But clearly they don’t, or at least when I visited, to be fair.

Then on a side note, and it’s not the main thing for me: service. Super slow, we had to wait long to get the menu, and they seemed to be hiding from the area all the time. We were ready to order and had to wait for long as well. I normally don’t care much, but if you charge me that amount of money, at least have a service that meets the minimum.

Honestly, deeply disappointed, I expected this to be a nice place to go for special occasions to enjoy good quality meet and end up in mediocrity and extremely expensive bill, would go back and wouldn’t...

The place itself is nice, well and stylefully decorated. The food was ok, beautifully plated but didn't stick out for me. Though the meat was ok, I missed a strong and juicy grilled flavour that I have come to expect from an Argentinian restaurant. However what really costed Buenos Aires a point is the service. Though they started strong they totally forgot about us, a group of 4 people and quite visible. Though it was full house and they asked for our understanding at the start, they were quite understaffed and most of the time just did not look in our direction or bothered to check up on our table. It even became more comicle when all 4 of us tried to get their attention. We did make eye contact up to 3 times with different personnel, which they would acknowledge, but then completely forgot about. After half an hour or more of waving we managed to get in touch, but by then they had already lost 2 rounds of possible drinks and our interest. I don't want to sound condescending but if your restaurant is fully booked with large groups make sure you have enough personnel in the house to deal with them and don't forget about the smaller tables because they bring less money to the table or so it felt to us, for the bigger tables got all the attention. We were also not the only small table...

We decided to go here because it had the highest rating in the area and despite my boyfriend being vegan and myself being vegetarian, there wasn’t an obvious alternative nearby, and we checked the menu and there were a few vegetarian options so we thought it would be absolutely fine. When we let the waiter (maybe the owner) know, he just looked at us blankly and said ‘It’s not really ok, this is a steakhouse’, and wouldn’t help us. I was really shocked and he sent another waitress to look after us. She was a little more sympathetic and talked us through what we could have. We had the veggie fajitas (not really sure they are made with steamed carrots in South America) and lots of sides, but it was such a hassle it was pretty embarrassing. When we asked for olives they came with a side of meat. It was like going back in time 20 years to a time when it was really unusual to be vegetarian/vegan. Such a shame because everyone else was having a great time, but there was no need to be...