Bohemian Bar & Restaurant — Restaurant in Aruba

We dined at Bohemian on the last night of our family vacation to Aruba. Two of us are longtime visitors to Aruba, and have dined at Bohemian many times in the past. We were looking forward to a delicious meal on the last night of our vacation, however that is not what we received.

We arrived on time for our 8:30 pm reservation and were seated promptly. When the hostess seated us she told us that the kitchen was running behind and that our order would be taken 15-20 minutes after we were seated, but we could order drinks in the meantime. It was a bit odd, but seemed reasonable so we sat down and prepared to order drinks, and this is where the trouble started. Most of us ordered water (there was no cocktail menu even though our waitress told us they have a full bar), and then we ordered a margarita, no salt, a glass of Cabernet, a Gin & Tonic and a Sprite. We waited for about 10-15 minutes for these drinks to arrive, and the margarita arrived with salt, not a big deal and easily corrected. Those of us who ordered water were still waiting for our waters to arrive, at this point.

We decided, at that point, that we would wait until 9:00 pm, and if our dinner order wasn't taken we would leave. At 8:55 pm, our waitress arrived to take our order. We all ordered entrees and waited. At 9:57 pm our first entree arrived. During the hour that we waited, our waitress never returned to take a second drink order or offer us anything while we waited. Out entrees came out a few at a time with the three orders of Mussels arriving about 5-7 minutes after everything else. By this point in the evening you can imagine that we were feeling frustrated by the lack of service and attention. This was far from the 15-20 minute delay that we were informed of when we sat down.

Our waitress checked with us once to see how our food was. Everyone's food tasted fine, and was prepared correctly. Still no word from the waitress about the wait or follow up for an additional drink order. When the bill came, we were understandably frustrated. We asked to speak with the manager about our experience, and this is where our evening took a very bad turn.

Natalie, the General Manager, came to our table and looked very confused as to why we were asking to speak with her. We explained our situation and asked what she could do to answer our concerns. Natalie stated that if we were dissatisfied with our service then we should not leave a tip. and that should be the end of it. As we explained why we were upset, Natalie continued to argue with each of us, and gesture to our empty table. She stated, "You ate, didn't you?" She did not acknowledge the slow service and seemed to blame our concerns on us by saying, "we told you there would be a wait!" Natalie was quite argumentative and appeared to not care about anything we were saying.She was absolutely unwilling to actually hear our concerns or make any concessions for the wait and bad service. Given that the kitchen was behind, we expected that a waiter or manager would check in with us at some point during our meal, but that never happened. We feel all of this could have been avoided, had someone checked in with us before dropping the bill. We left very upset by our experience, and will not be returning. We are also disappointed, because, as I mentioned, two of us were frequent repeat customers during prior trips to Aruba.

I would not recommend that anyone dine at Bohemia, unless you're looking for your dinner to last several hours and wait an extremely long time for your food and...

This place is pretty new, and it is obvious that the Bohemian team is still cutting their teeth, but I think there is a really great thing happening here and I hope these guys stay the course. The ambience at Bohemian is worth the price of admission alone. Built around some existing, mature trees and vegetation on the Palm Beach strip (our least favourite area of the island), it is a spacious, night-time oasis that is very easy on the eyes. It is also very easy on the ears. The music is very much French continental/gypsy cafe meets acid jazz/bassanova/trip-hop type of vibes and is piped through a very decent sounding audio system that provides a very rich listening experience considering it is outdoors. There appears to be some platters and a few shelves of vinyl behind the bar, but the DJ doesn't start until 11pm on Fridays and Saturdays which is too bad, because I'd love to check it out but that is way past my bedtime these days. As for the food, it was really great. The bread and olive tapenade that is set out is superb. I had the onion soup to start and it was fantastic. The ribeye and mash was superb - not a Gaucho thickness ribeye but still cooked a perfect medium rare and packing a deliciously subtle flavour punch that didn't come about by over seasoning. The mash was dynamite - served in a small Le Creuset - and may have been some of the best potatoes we have had. The fish dish we had with sea bass, roasted potatoes and zucchini was great but took a back seat to the ribeye and mash. We really wanted to try the profiterole but we simply had no more room in our bellies. Service was great, owners present, and staff seemed happy to be there which says a lot. Really looking forward to seeing the team at Bohemian grow as their objectives crystalize. If I could suggest two things it would be this: beef up your beer list with a hand full of standouts that open up that gap where your differentiator is concerned. Also, get somebody spinning that wax during a dinner service or two - just because some of us are old(ish) and in bed by 11pm, doesn't mean we don't want to be courted with that personalized sound. Keep it up guys! You have a great...

Beautiful scenery with lush fauna all around you and creative ways to make pockets of privacy in close quarters. That’s about it for positives.

The happy hour drinks were awful, they got our dinner order entirely wrong (how do you mess up 3 orders of grouper and give us snapper and bronzino instead and lie to us telling us it’s grouper when all 3 look different and 2 have red scales?) Then when they brought out the grouper it was dry and tough. There were flies everywhere.

They wouldn’t give us the wine we asked for but brought out a different wine instead which wasn’t horrible but not what we wanted. The SERVICE oh god, the service took 2 hours. Our first waitress Jenny was nice, knowledgeable, and attentive for the first 5 minutes we had her, then this new waitress Andrea barged in and ran her off telling her our table was her territory which is fine if that’s your zone but then other staff were stepping in to check on us instead.

When we wanted to ask the sommelier (wine expert) about a wine on their menu, waitress intervened making up some CLEARLY incorrect wine info to the point she thought we were talking about a red when it was a white and only THEN did she admit she didn’t know much about wine and got the sommelier like we asked. It was a mess. Andrea made up all these excuses about why they brought us the wrong dinner and never apologized for her error.

They charged us for everything, $300, no comps for all the mess-ups, no birthday ANYTHING for my father, and for as slow and inattentive as Andrea was, she brought us the check faster than anything else.

It’s a shame because we’ve been coming here for years. Never again. Such a shame; they had a handful of opportunities to make things right but just kept messing up more and more as the evening wore on.

The cherry atop the nonexistent birthday cake of poor service and bad food is that as of writing this review, my dad and I have been sick to our stomachs since...