Restaurant Maz Mez — Restaurant in Amsterdam

Visited this place with my friend. Very cosy atmosphere and really nice design of the restaurant. We shared a menu of 8 cold and 8 warm dishes. The food was tasty.

The reason for us only giving two stars is the service and the price/quality ratio of the food.

The personnel were friendly enough, but we had to wait, wait and wait a bit more. The cold dishes came in pretty quickly but after that it took a long time before they cleared the table and an even longer time before we got the warm food. We waited more than 45 minutes to get our warm food. And after that more waiting to get the table cleared and to pay the bill. Several other tables came in after us and left before us. We strated to think we had unwillingly and by mistake offended the waiters in some way, when they seemed to totally dismiss us. But what we might have done, we do not know.

And the price/quality/amount of the food. For us two women the size of the portions were okay. But if we would have come with our husbands they would bot have been full after this dinner. Pretty small portions. But when it comes to the price/quality ratio, what put us off the most was that they charged us 12€ for two bottles of water, a price that was not shown anywhere. Had we known the bottle of water already standing on the table when we came was this expensive, we would have asked for tap water instead. Since the tap water here in Amsterdam is...

The food is quite tasty and well presented, however the portions are a little small and it is definitely too expensive for what they offer. We had to pay: 7,5 euro for a bottle of water (they place it on every table to lure customers in drinking it instead of ask for tap water, but the price is not even mentioned on the menu), 50 euro for a medriocre bottle of wine, 6 euro for a piece of pita (literally 1 piece!). I went in many Middle-Eastern restaurants and never had to pay for pita. If I order dishes like hummus and baba ganoush, the bread should come together with them, it is like ordering fish and chips and pay extra for the chips. Also, I usually don't mind if the waiters engage with customers or not, but the 2 people that served us never smiled and just quickly mentioned the dish names when leaving them at the table. I gave them 3 stars only because the food was good, and I don't give less than 3 stars if I ate well, but I will not visit this restaurant again. There are many other Middle-Eastern cusine restaurants in Amsterdam with good food, friendly staff and...

Overall nice food and nice atmosphere but the way things are charged (when the bill arrives) makes you feel a bit scammed and not wanting to go back.

For example, they put a water bottle on each table to incentivize paying for still water. We knew that would be the case and felt rude to ask for tab so we just accepted it. But they then charged it 7.50 which is ridiculous. On the bill it's also listed as some other 'fancier' brand.

(Edit: looked through older reviews and it seems this was the case before but the water was charged for 5.)

Another example is the meze pricing. The normal meze is meat and the deluxe meze is meat and fish. They offer a vegetarian alternative which we assumed would be charged as the normal meze (they don't clarify on the menu) but they charge you for the deluxe.That was surprising especially as one of the warm meze dishes came quite burned. We didn't say anything to not make...