De Bruine Boon — Restaurant in Leiden

My wife and I visited for dinner on Good Friday this year (18-04-2025). We did not have a reservation, but were given a table straight away. We chose to have the "3-course choice menu" for €28.50 (that includes a starter + main course + dessert). We also separately bought drinks. For the starter we both chose to have the fried goat cheese, the main I had the round steak and my wife had the vegan burger. For dessert, I chose the white chocolate cheesecake and my wife had the warm apple pie. You can see photos of both mains and both desserts. The food was tasty, though not the best, as it was not salty enough (my wife particularly felt that with her fries). What brings the rating down is how slow the service was. I joke you not, we spend one hour and a half from sitting down and ordering to actually paying the bill, through no fault of our own! The servers were nice (smiling, friendly, etc.), but the food was sooooo slooooow coming out of the kitchen. And the place was not even fully busy! I dont want to imagine what it is like when they have a full house. Noteworthy is the fact that the toilets are on the first floor, so you dont need to climb stairs to get to them and wash your hands. Overall, while my wife and I do not regret sitting down here for dinner and were pleased there were main vegetarian options that could be chosen from (which is not always the case in other establishments), it is not a restaurant we would repeat due to the length of time we had...

Note: After the events I described below transpired and I left this review, the restaurant got in touch with me and they sent me a voucher to use in one of their restaurants after I described what happened to them. The food was good, everything was very tasty and the waitress tending our table was very friendly. However, the only reason we went in this place was because we saw the specially priced menu they had (I think it was available from Sunday until Wednesday or something) which included steak and fries, and was 15 euros. Even though I specifically said to the waitress that we wanted to order that special menu, we learned when paying the bill that they brought us another steak meal from their menu and not the one we asked for. They refused to give us a refund because "we had already eaten it", but I don't exactly get how we were supposed to know that what we were eating wasn't what we ordered? I don't believe the price difference was really big that giving us our deserved refund would affect a place that has such high ratings and has been around since 1975, but I definitely won't visit this...

We stopped here after leaving the train station to walk in Leiden. Service was okay, we wanted to order food, but he forgot to come back to the table. I looked in his direction to take our food order. I had the tippy beef steak baguette and my husband had the meatball baguette. The food was nice and hot. I thought 🤔 my husbands meatball looked fantastic. It was one large meatball in a dish. It tasted nice too! The apple pie was delicious 😋 too, we ordered it the same time as our mains. Definitely recommend having the apple pie. The food is 5 ⭐. Given 4 ⭐ due to service was a...