Pesca Rotterdam — Restaurant in Rotterdam

Everything about me makes me want to hate this place but the food is so good I just can't. The food really is exceptional. Well thought out, an excellent combination of flavour and texture with the fish and seafood taking the stage front and centre.

My issue is the gimmicks. You arrive on time just to wait while the "concept" is explained to the people in front of you, which adds to the backlog. If something takes that long to explain there's something wrong. If there's a backlog at the door there's an issue. If I make a reservation and am in time, I expect to be seated on time. But no...Then you go into the queue. You wait at the bar with a glass of prosecco that should really be complimentary considering the length of time you've had to wait. The people ahead of us got popcorn, we did not. Then once the queue has dispersed a bit, you go wait for the fish market or "fish theatre" as it's called. 🙄You have a consultation where you view the fish and order what you want. It's all a bit ridiculous considering the menu hasn't changed in yonks based on the pictures here. A complete waste of time. By all means let people look at the fish, but the menu is the same... Why are you wasting staff and customer time on this charade of pretense? Then onto the wine market which is just an exercise in upselling. This might be good for people who don't know wine or don't know what they want, but we knew what we wanted and knew it would go well with what we ordered, but the "sommelier" proceeded to mansplain how what we wanted wouldn't go with what we ordered and tried to upsell to an unsuitable bottle twice the cost. We persevered and eventually got what we wanted, which of course paired perfectly with everything that we ordered. Another waste of time and energy. Give an option, wine list or visit the wine market. Then you finally get to your table toting a bucket with your wine and water.

You get a plate each and a basket with cutlery and napkins. The plate is not replaced between courses, meaning the dishes end up merging and that doesn't always work. I'd much rather the people unnecessarily deployed to the various markets were deployed serving tables and making the whole experience more enjoyable and efficient. Service outside the "markets" was friendly but inattentive. Our empty plates sat there way too long.

That being said, the food makes all the BS and mansplaining worth it. It really is excellent. Everything we had was top notch. Even the bread. Although lemongrass and kaffir lime, as wonderful as they are, have absolutely no business being in butter, but the bread was so good you didn't need the hipster butter. The scallops were sheer perfection. Gambas were wonderful too, albeit a tiny bit undercooked. The sea bream was spectacular, the beauty of the fish shone through with the simplicity of the BBQ cooking. Really excellent. Chips were perfect and all the side you need. Don't let them upsell you to anything else. Although, having said that, the Burrata salad was pretty sublime, but wholly surplus to our needs! We left absolutely stuffed and pleasantly surprised with the bill considering the overall lack of transparency with pricing.

Overall, highly recommended for some good fish and seafood, but be prepared to go through some seriously frustrating and tedious rigamarole to get to your table and actually eat. The lack of price transparency is ridiculous too. It's actually quite reasonably priced and I reckon if they were transparent with pricing they'd sell a lot more. We expected a 300 euro+ bill because we honestly didn't know what to expect, but we were pleasantly surprised by half that. The prosecco when you enter, the bread, the water, it should all be very clear what you are going to have to pay.

Also if you booked online and paid the deposit, make sure you check your bill, they did not deduct ours, but once pointed out, it was...

Garbage. A lot wrong with this restaurant and it affected our experience: In Pesca's official website they sell this concept of "sharing food with the table". You decide together what food you want to share and what kind of menu you get to eat that day. The idea of eating something that the whole table is satisfied with sounded enticing to us, and that was the expectation when we decided to dine here. Pesca is not providing the customers with what they promise. Not only is the food served seperately, you need to wait 15 minutes to eat the next batch of food, allegedly. In our situation we waited 1 hour. We had to pathetically share the "main" fish 1 hour seperate from the side dishes. The staff explained that the late timing was due to lack of employees. If this was the case, why was only our (and one other) table lacking service. If the restaurant doesn't have enough employees, why doesn't it affect other tables as well? We saw many other tables around us being served even though we ordered almost 2 hours before them. They also claimed that our special diet caused tardiness of served food. The other table, that experienced same poor service, had to also wait 1 hour but they didn't have any special diet (according to the conversation we had after dining at this restaurant). Ergo, this restaurant claims that our special diet is our problem and therefore we need to wait longer for service? Unbelievable excuses. It seemed that when the staff had realised their mistake, they would not admit it. They came up with excuse after excuse. If only they had been honest with us that the kitchen is having a bit of difficulty or that they forgot our order, which it seemed that they totally did, we would've appreciated it. On top of that. The classic cooked mussels were cooked in only salt water, at least that was what it tasted like. French-style mussels are usually cooked in plenty of butter, white wine and garlic, of which we tasted none in our dish. Besides, visible number of the mussels were closed which means they were already spoiled way before preparation of dish. The system of choosing wine is faulty as well. The staff opens the bottles way before the customers can decide on their final order. Leading to the customers being forced to buy the wine bottle in question, even if the wine is not to the customers' tastes. (What happened in our situation.) Extremely disappointed. Especially after reading reviews of this restaurant and hearing recommendations from locals. We didn't experience what we were promised.  And especially on...

Later edit

After a not so lucky first dining experience at Pesca, the venue reached out to us in order to understand what might have caused our food poisoning. They really were concerned with our well being and behaved very professional. As an apology, they sent us a limoncello bottle at home and they invited us to dine again on their expense. We decided to give the venue a second chance as we didn’t want to end with a bad memory. The second experience was fantastic. We were welcomed with a glass of Cava and some butter and bread while the fish market opened (this time we went for lunch). Then we tried the marinated salmon, scallops, tuna steak and the grilled dorade, all delicious and perfectly cook. We ended with the chocolate party dessert which was also very good. Overall an amazing experience and we thank the staff for how they acted in this situation. We now have a good memory and opinion of Pesca and we will return with other occasions as well.

Original review

What started as a lovely dinner turned out into the worst food poisoning. Me and my friend chose this place for a celebration as we are both fish and seafood lovers, and the reviews were really good. While the dinner itself was nice, the food tasted good and we loved the fish market concept, the next day things started to go downhill. We both got very sick, with vomiting, diarrhea, shivering, fever and fainting. We thought whether this was caused by something else, but this was the only meal we had in common and all the other food we ate afterwards was at home, stuff that we usually eat. Therefore although we loved the concept, the atmosphere, the wine and the food options, something was clearly not fresh (we had oysters, lobster, langoustines, octopus and mussels). So I can only give this place one star because it was a very expensive food poisoning and we will not be remaining with a good memory of this place. My advice is don’t...