by NOA — Restaurant in The Hague

Good food but terrible service: we waited 1h for our drinks and 1h30 for the starters!

The following critic has nothing to do with the quality the food. The cooks knew what they were doing and it tasted good. The service was plain and simply bad and an embarrassment for the restaurant.

There were 2 waiters for six tables.

We arrived for our reservation at 19:30. The first waitress came after 5 min and asked if we were already ready to order. We weren’t and we asked for 5 more min. She then just forgot about us for the next 30 min. At 20:00 she came back to us and asked for the our order. I ordered a 3 courses Menu and selected my dishes. The 1. waitress then went straight back to the kitchen before taking our drink order. We then were again ignored for the next 15 min before the 2. waiter came to our table and asked if we wanted to order some food. We told him that we already ordered but that we couldn’t order something to drink. The 2. waiter then took our command and finally our drinks arrived at 20:30. He then told me that there was an issue with my menu command. Apparently it wasn’t possible to choose freely from the cart, because the Menu were already set. From the Menu booklet itself it wasn’t recognizable that this was the case but fair enough. The 1. waitress also did not appeared to be aware of this fact. She also disappeared after our last interaction. Although the other table were served some bread & olives (Amuse-Bouche), we did not receive some. Only after having explicitly asked for some bread we received the amuse bouche. At 21:00 we finally received our food. At this point we waited one hour and 30 min before getting any food. The food tasted really good. The last straw was when I received the wrong dessert from another menu. The 2. waiter just put it in front of me without explaining anything. When I asked about it he just told to me: “Yeah sorry the kitchen gave me this dessert for you, do you mind?”. Yes I did mind but I just wanted to be finished with this experience and leave. We did up spending almost 3h in this restaurant and half of it was just waiting for the service.

So yeah, it was the most disastrous service experience in a restaurant which I...

Was looking for restaurants with a rating 4.5 and stumbled upon this, made a reservation, even called when we were running late. It was a quiet night, so thought, hmm, maybe it's not as good as the Google review score.

Anyhow, we were pleasantly surprised. We chose the 3 course meal with wine pairing. The pork belly was excellent, not too crispy, very tender, and seasoned (usually you'll be lucky if your food is seasoned with salt and pepper in NL 😀 ). The red perch was also good and went well with the fennel that came with it. The dessert, simple vanilla ice cream with some sauce 😋 Don't remember what is was, but tasted well with the port paired with it.

Service was also good, friendly and fun. We joked about getting a flight of water and it was delivered enthusiastically. Sourcy water with lavender, Rose water and just plain Den Haag water.

I usually don't like going to restos attached to hotels, because the vibe can be a bit stiff. This time I really enjoyed it and also left well fed. I didn't have to go home and cook...

The wine selection is great. Good quality wine, the service is fantastic. But here is my thoughts on the food. The pork belly was quite interesting - the pork belly itself was well cooked, tasty. However the combinations to vegetables, puree and sauces were just off, too many flavours were fighting to be a hero and going into different directions. Moving onto the main course, the sirloin steak was almost another disaster, the cut was un-even so 1 part was welldone and another part was medium rare, again everything else came with it was standing alone on its own. Put down almost the whole pot of salt to give some flavour to the steak.

I gave 4 stars because of the wine and...