Maris Piper Brasserie — Restaurant in Amsterdam

We come to Amsterdam every year and are always dining at new places, very excited we had booked a reservation at Maris Piper given the reputation of the Breda Group. Sadly, it was a bit of a disappointment.

Atmosphere & Service: The restaurant is beautiful, quite impressive the moment you walk through the door with the open kitchen, beautiful banquets, flooring, lighting and more. However, we were not seated in the main dining area but were instead seated on the built-in patio. This is a very narrow space and all of the tables along the interior wall (where we were seated in the last spot) require diners to sit side-by-side looking at the 2-top directly in-front of you instead of each other. Further, the wall sconce directly behind us was so bright and shines down the wall directly between you and your dining partner, again not ideal for conversation. Our server was charming, very pleasant (maybe from Greece) but he seemed to be the only waiter covering the entire patio so it was quite difficult to get his attention when we wanted to order or get another glass of wine.

The Food: The Butterhead salad was very plain, stacked lettuce that was under-dressed. The grilled artichoke seems to be a staple at Maris Piper but we did not enjoy it. The petals were tough to pull-out and had little meat, the tips of the petals are all charred so you’re literally left with black fingers when you're finished with a very small half of a heart for your efforts. We also found the vegetables with Joselita and spinach & mushrooms fairly ordinary. Our mains were the spring chicken, more the size of a small game hen... and you only get half of the bird that you'll need to pull apart for a small serving of meat. My cod dish was unremarkable and pieces of the fish were a bit chewy.

Maybe it was an off-night for Maris Piper but with a 4.2 rating, I’m clearly not the only one who didn’t enjoy their...

Extremely mediocre.

I came to Maris Piper to celebrate my birthday after wanting to visit the restaurant for some time.

Immediately as we were seated I noticed that the order for the table across from us went wrong which made me quite apprehensive for the evening.

We were seated at the table from the maître who kindly took our order for water, after a time we were given the drink menu from the bartender who we informed that we were still waiting for the water. After again some time we were approached by a blonde waitress who helped us right away with fixing the water which we had been waiting 20 minutes for.

Later we were informed that they were out of the octopus dish ( which can happen ofcourse) so we adjusted our choices for the starter. Then for the main course also options were not available! Again we had to make a different choice seeing as we were not informed that many items from the menu were run out or as the maitre had informed us “the kitchen had not made an optimal preparation”.

We struck this as bad luck for us and continued to order a cocktail to cheer us up from the disappointment. And what would you have it? Also no espresso martini available to order! Now the disappointment and quite frankly anger had set in. We ordered an extremely expensive main course to share which was quite excellent but not worth the €75.

Having to call down the staff for attention all the time and seeing as the whole evening ended up being such a travesty I can whole heartedly say that I wish I had spent my birthday somewhere else seeing as the restaurant offered what seemed like half the menu for extreme prices. I would have loved to see this restaurant excel but unfortunately this whole experience really made a bad night of my day. Not worth the €200+ euro...

Dishonest and greedy

I rarely write about negative experience in new business, but I will make an exception in this case.

I decided to give this new restaurant a visit. I walked in. Just a man from the neighborhood. The restaurant was almost full and the hostess said they were fully booked. She told me to make a reservation next time.

Good idea, I must write that one down… I wished them a good luck with the new restaurant and walked away. Talking to the hostess, I felt something was off backed up by the fact she did not suggest waiting for few minutes. It is a big restaurant and she could offer me to wait, even for a while. so, I just called the restaurant few minutes later asking if there was a table for four people, right away. “Sure, no problems… “

So, yield management, it was. A very risky approach when facing a customer. She preferred giving the table to four people, not one. By the way, the amount of noise there is at the level you cannot hear anything. This was always a problem with that property. Few things that hostess did not know: Yield management is a risky business in Horeca and in the era of social media, being dishonest with a customer, could be very risky.

The photos on Googler maps, that got thousands of views, were mine. I took them from the outside few days ago. I love supporting new business when they deserve it.

I have been dining in this property far long before it became Maris Piper and as it seems, will be dining there long after it is gone. There was no successful restaurant in this property for the last fifteen years.

I can just wish Maris Piper good luck. They would...