Grand Café De Wheem — Restaurant in Meppel

Came here with my family a while back for a Birthday dinner and found our experience to be quite nice.

We reserved a table for 7people about a week prior, requested a high chair and everything was handled efficiently.

As a family we ordered the following, (excluding drinks): 2x bavette 2x catch of the day (1gf) (salmon) 1x duo duck 1x chefs special (entrecote) Kids: tomato soup, poffertjes 1x Proeverij for 4persons Several sides, including: fries, salad

And for dessert to share: 1x Cheesecake 1x Dame blanche

The food was beautifully plated, had plenty of flavour and everything had the right temperature upon being served.

What surprised me was the quality of the meats they serve. I don't get my hopes up when it comes to Dutch restaurants in regards to properly cooked steaks and premium cuts, yet De Wheem truly surprised us. All the food we ordered, even the side dishes were truly lovely, even for international standards.

We did however experience a slack in drink service. We ordered several rounds of drinks over our entire seating and 3/6 rounds didn't arrive, or we had to ask the waiter when it would arrive. When we finished our mains and ordered our dessert we also placed a tea and coffee order. After 25min of wait we asked the waiter again if it was coming and they apologized that the bar "forgot it again". At that point we requested those drinks to be taken off our bill and that we'd like to pay.

The restaurant itself has a nice ambience, looks beautiful and has plenty of tables available. The bathrooms looked clean and fully stocked.

Staff wears outfits that equalize both male as female and it looked pretty sharp for the overall aesthetic.

Last but not least: a special shout-out for a restaurant that not only serves good meats, but also has their knives BEAUTIFULLY sharpened! Capital letters: "beautifully".

We enjoyed our visit and would definitely recommend this place to others. They do however have room for improvement in regards to their...

De Wheem is a very good restaurant. Upon entering it I did not know what to expect, it is a restaurant which is a shoe store during the day, which is quite a new concept to me.

The interior looked great, it was seperated from the shoe store, but because you could see some of the shoes and clothing (most of it was put out of view by curtains) I rated the decor 'Very good'. For the rest the interior was modern, yet cozy, and the coffee bar was really impressive. (Their proffesional coffee machine made very good coffee)

The service was excellent, they made a change in our menue because they had run out of tiramisu. So they brought us a plate filled with all the other deserts they had, so we could pick whatever we wanted without extra charging us for this. They were certainly worth their tip. They were friendly and their timing was good in bringing the food & asking if we wanted to have another drink.

And now comes what is most importand: The food. The chef was fairly quik at making our food, the portions weren't small nor too big, I left with a good filled stomach. The food was of a very high standard. It looked great, and it tasted even better than it looked. The taste was very well 'balanced', not overly seasoned, with three good tasting components, a small salad which was refreshing, the meat was properly prepared, and the vegetables which had just the right flavour for this dish. Their menu is simple, they have two vegetarian main courses, two beef main courses, two fish main courses and two swine main courses. So you won't have to look ages before you are able to order.

All in all it was a good experience, and I'm certain that I'm going to eat here...

I had the Caesar salad. It was served with very hot chicken thigh meat which was fatty, grisly, cartilidge-filled and completely unseasoned. The chicken was dumped on the salad while hot, so the lettuce was mostly wilted and cooked. This place wins my reward for the worst salad I have ever ordered. I ate only about 5 bites, but it was so truly vile that I just left everything on the plate. The waitress took the full plate away and didn't even ask if it was good. Pretty crazy for a 20€ salad!

I would also say that out of our group of 7 people, only 3 actually enjoyed and finished their food. Only one person felt like it was worth complaining but the waitress just sorta shrugged.

The service was also exceptionally bad, with one member of our group ordering a cold desert that took over 45 minutes to be delivered.

When considering the extremely high price of the food and drinks for a small city like Meppel, this place is definitely one to avoid wasting money on. A dining experience that kinda put a damper on the whole evening until we went...