Fish Me Fishmarket — Restaurant in Bergen

We visited this place during our stay in Bergen during March 2024 as tourists. We asked if we could sit on the porch and eat one of their traditional sandwiches (the baguette with salmon/ shrimps, etc) or fish soup. They replied affirmatively, The view was nice and the place looked clean. What I did not like was the fact that although in the beginning everyone was kind with us, after we sat and gave our order, the employee who took our order (not the other ones) changed his behavior towards us to the worst. Maybe he though that since we were tourists, we would spend a fortune in the restaurant and then , after we gave our order he got disappointed.. I do not know… But, I did not like his behavior. He was rude. He was making face grimaces after taking our order and this is something not polite when addressing a client. It made me feel awkward and I even started looking in the other tables to check what they had ordered. There were tables with less expensive things that the ones that we ordered and the clients were treated nicely. Which, did not happen in our case. For example. We asked for water together with the food. In the other tables, they brought it without even asking. For free as soon as the client sat at the table. In our case, when we asked for it, the employee made a sign of exasperation. Thankfully, another younger employee saw us and he brought it to us with pleasure. Then my friend, wanted to say that she wanted a sandwich with salmon only no omelette in it (they had a sandwich with omelette and salmon in the menu). She was not understood and the employee made grimaces at her like if she was asking something extravagant. You are in a tourist city, work in a restaurant in the tourist area in the centre of the city. Ok, you may not speak English fluently but, when working in the customer service sector, you have to be pleasant and act gentlemanly. No odd faces and exasperated looks. The client tries to be friendly and make himself understood in English which is not his native language either in the end. It’s not like he is trying to explain to you a Russian proverb or something in Russian. Show some understanding and collaboration from your part as well. You are the one working and being paid to assist him. Not the client. In the end, we paid 20-25€ each one of us for a cold sandwich. It is not a lot but, it is not even a little compared to the EE medium costs. At least, show some basic cordiality. Second disadvantage is that the bathroom is outside the building. So, if you are eating and want to go to the bathroom, you will have to wear your jacket because of the low temperatures in the area which might not be convenient...

Fish Me: Expensive tourist trap from hell, go anywhere else.

We were two people, did not reserve a table but were accommodated after waiting a few minutes. The atmosphere is what you see, busy, noisy and cold; doors are open pretty much all the time.

We had troubles communicating with our waiter in both Norwegian and English, she had troubles catching my order of one pilsner, ended up with a coke zero.

We ordered two starters (fish soup & local platter) and two main courses (king crab and burger), this seems to be too much for this establishment to handle. We waited for 50 minutes before the first dishes arrived, they served both the starter and main course to one of the guests at the same time. We declined this service, as we expect to be served all starters first. It then subsequently took them 5 minutes to serve both starters. We received our main courses about 1h30m after we placed our orders. The wait was so long we contemplated leaving the place before our starters arrived, we were shrugged of by the waiter when we reached out for information.

Our starters were tasty, no complaints. But our main courses were so dry that our mouths turned into Sahara, almost like they reheated our dishes (we saw them ready to be served at the same time as our starters, then taken back into the kitchen).

Upon paying they gave us the bill for another table, but it was easy to solve.

This place is a disgrace to dining in Norway, you are better off buying a sausage if you want good...

This restaurant is a disgrace to Bergen and it’s reputation.

We went there for lunch and should probably have seen the signals that this is a tourist trap when we saw the menu.

There was absolutely nothing on the menu indicating that they would serve anything close fresh fish. Options like shrimps on a piece of bread, salmon burger, fish and chips were not really what we expected from a fish market “restaurant”.

We ordered the first two options (shrimps and salmon burger) and waited 45 mins only for the waiter (who seemed more annoyed that we were there) to come back and announce that they were out of salmon burger. How can it take 45 mins to figure out that you’re out of salmon burgers? This was just yet another sign that they don’t prepare food fresh. How else would you run out of salmon before you even open for dinner?

We then opted for the fish and chips which luckily came 10 mins later. Throwing fish in the deep fryer and putting some shrimps on a piece of bread shouldn’t take more than that anyways.

The fish lacked taste, the shrimps were not peeled properly and the fries were extremely salty. It’s obvious that no love was put into “making” the food.

Unfortunately I don’t have other recommendations for great fish restaurants in Bergen, but please do yourself and everyone else a favor and stay away from this place. You would get more value for the money by buying the fish burger...