The Saint — Restaurant in Hoorn

Beautiful location, amazing decoration and atmosphere but poorly trained staff and overpriced food.

I am Dutch and live in Portugal - as I miss some food I asked for an off-menu dish (a Dutch specialty called “sateh”) as I believed I ordered this 1-2 years ago and liked it a lot.

The waitress apparently didn’t like the ask and replied “they only serve culinary food and I should reconsider”.

That didn’t felt great - but still not a show stopper as the lunch menu offered several options (mostly luxury sandwiches). We ordered a steak tartare and a Dutch shrimp croquet sandwich. Each sandwich was priced over 17 euros - hence expectations were set.

When the food arrived, we were surprised with the minimalist portion of tartare (a soup spoon full) as well as the lack of almost any shrimp in the croquettes (we found 3 - remember Dutch shrimps are very tiny). No salad to the side, no side dishes and everything was served on a hotdog style bread.

While the food was freshly made and the croquettes were tasty (but contained merely only ragout and no “meat”) - we felt we paid way too much for these dishes and were sorry we stayed after the initial remark of the waitress.

It is a pity as the restaurant itself is absolutely amazing, but a strong signal it was nearly empty during lunchtime on a Saturday beautiful afternoon with the busy local market out on the street.

The manager who we shared our unhappiness was very friendly, but there was no spontaneous initiative to make us leave happier. A small Dutch drink (oranjebitter or something else locally) when delivering the bill would likely have prevented this negative review.

I usually do not leave a review for a place which I have negative feelings - I prefer to push forward what is good in life, I just could not...

We had a negative experience and would not recommend. We asked for nojitos, which were on their online menu, but the waiter said they don't do that and brought us a paper menu. He came back to take our order and made us feel pressured to choose, even if we were not really ready. The list of mocktails on their new menu only has 3 items and they are not described, so we too one of each and were quite disappointed: all 3 were very basic, premade drinks with barely any add-ons. I wonder, how are they not be able to make a simple nojito. They also forgot one coffee, and we had to go ask for it. Turns out they did not note it down when taking the order, and claimed we did not ask for it. They took a good 15 minutes to deliver that coffee then. Overall, it was close to 1 hour later when we had something to drink on the table for everyone. When they brought the bill, they forgot some items, which we corrected. Honestly very surprised by the general sloppines and unprofessionalism, at such a special location. Really put a dent...

The restaurant is beautiful, the location is great, with parking space close by. The atmosphere is lovely. But the food is a total dissapointment. We had the filled eggs with caviar as a starter and that was very very dissapointing. The eggs were literally taken out of the fridge, cut open and had some sauce put on top with caviar. It was not enjoyable. Filled eggs are supposed to be actually filled, not with something on top.

We then had the zuurkool salade with parelhoen, but that was not tasty. We also irdered the noodles with mushrooms and that was tasteless. I even had to ask for salt and pepper for it. We didn’t like it. The kafswang was not great but nod bad, it was a very small portion though. The fish was good but nothing special. Only one carrot as “zilte groenten”. We also ordered fries and “salad” On the side, but the salad was only lettuce. It was dissapointing. The desserts (creme bruilee and tarte tatin) were very good. We won’t recommend...