De Hondekop — Restaurant in Utrecht

Place looks nice, location is good, service is terrible, food is OK-ish.

Like most restaurants in NL they’re way understaffed, we first had to wait 30min to order a drink and another 40min to be able to order food, after we had to walk up to a waiter ourselves.

The food options are a bit limited and very vegetarian oriented in my opinion. I couldn’t wrap my head around how they could offer a Caesar salad where the chicken needs to be added as ‘extra’, and the word ‘extra’ also made it appear as there would be chicken in it already, and it was just an option for more.. We quickly found out that was not the case.

Also the bitterballen and kroketten were named rather cryptically, it was hard to tell from the menu whether they were made of meat or not.

Then for the quality and taste of the food it was also not too great unfortunately. I ordered my steak medium-rare but it arrived more close to medium/well-done and the taste was quite bland. But since we had been sitting there for so long already I just accepted my fate..

I actually came back a couple weeks later to have lunch, but it wasn’t any better. Turned out that half of our group got a menu with different pieces and allergy info and the waitress didn’t seem to know which was the right one. Way to go…

I hope they’ll review their menus and just spend a little more time to improve the naming and descriptions of the food. That, and offer some proper training to the waiters and kitchen and it could really live up to its potential! Let’s see in a year or so if they...

I had been wanting to try this place for quite some time since I always spotted it from the train on the way out of Utrecht. The atmosphere definitely lived up to the expectations you would have from looking at other reviews on Google. It’s a cool building with a nice vibe. The service was polite and prompt.

Unfortunately, the food itself was quite underwhelming. What you get is dressed up to look fancy, but the actual taste doesn’t match the presentation. Usually, when you pay a decent price for a relatively small plate, you would expect a lot of flavor, but it was quite bland. Even proper salting of the food would have gone a long way. I couldn’t help but leave feeling disappointed. The fries were the only thing that didn’t let me down.

De Hondekop charges the price of what it aspires to be, not what it is. Even the tap water aspires to be something more and will set you back €2.50 for a bottle that probably costs the establishment less than one cent, which we were informed is “normal.”

It wasn’t bad, but it just...

Real beautiful grand old train remise/hangar loft, remodeled into a bakery/restaurant where the food is okay but not super amazing. We had a skinbaked fishfilet which I didn’t really like, Turkish peppers with labneh that lacked a little love, a tandoori cauliflower that was actually the best, a green gazpacho that was nice and a very simple green salad that was okay but which lacked fantasy. The desert was good so 3 stars. The big hall itself is an asset just...