Zarathustra Meyhane — Restaurant in Oslo

We were super psyched when we heard there came a new venue that calls themselves as “meyhane”. I am from Turkey and what I miss about home is the exceptional food. Many might think about Turkey as kebab country but we have so rich cuisine that includes meze, vegetables and casseroles in various ways. So meyhane is a concept where you can have various types of meze plates to share and drink raki. The problem with this restaurant starts right there: their so called full pakke includes both cold and warm mezes and a main course and a dessert. But it’s not meant for sharing. The menu doesn’t explain anything about the details of these mezes. Knowing that this restaurant doesn’t stick to the original Turkish Meyhane concept, we would like to see more details to learn about their twist on this. We ask to our waiter, he counts them and we feel like ok there is plenty of meze in the full pakke and lets order 2 full pakkes and share them. We were 4. We also ordered additonal dishes like falafel and sigara borek. We thought if we want more, we can add more main course or single meze dishes later on. Falafel portion was having literally 2,5 falafels in it! That was for our vegetarian friend and we were surprised by the serving size. Who serves a half falafel. And when we asked the waiter he confirmed that the serving size is 2,5 falafels. The mezes are brought in the small plates and it was having 2 orders in 1 plate. So when they serve only 2 midye dolmas, that is actually 1 of each full pakke. This looks very weak and definitely not fitting the meze concept. You never serve 1 thing in a plate and call it meze. The problem is, we couldn’t see any of these mezes in their a la carte section, so there was no way adding more of the ones we liked. We just had to accept the small sizes and start tasting from each. Many of them were extremely salty, midye dolma (mussel) was overcooked, and there were many dishes that were very basic and not having the sophistication of a meze. What we loved most was sigara borek (fried pastry with feta cheese in it). The main course of the full pakke was lamb and we didn’t like the dry and over-grilled meat. We had the traditional Turkish Raki. They have only the most traditional one. We could have liked to have the new generation brands and types too. Serving raki in a water glass is an unacceptable thing. We were shocked to see that. Overall they may please some people who would like to try something different but they should remove the “meyhane” from their title, it’s utterly misleading and in some way I find it disrespectful. I will not go to this restaurant again based on the...

I feel like we visited a different restaurant than the other, positive, reviewers.

The menu and the dishes are not bad on a conceptual level but execution was so bad that I wouldn't be surprised if the original chef left without teaching the one following. Hence he is recreating dishes with just a menu in hand, not knowing how they were meant to be.

Basically each small dish in the "full pakke" that didn't come out of a box (like olives or feta) had something off balance. Too much salt, too much garlic, too little salt, not cooked enough, frying oil tasted old, frying done at too low of a temperature etc. Seriously, a sigar børek is not easy to mess up but they managed to make it soggy and taste of old frying oil.

When you eat many courses the timing of food is also important and this was also not good. After warm meze it took around 30 minutes to get the meat and at that point we had stopped caring. To be fair the braised meat wasn't half bad, if I had only that with some sides for a decent price it would've been a forgettable but ok evening.

Desert was just a dollop of yoghurt with some crumbles. Would've been OK if served at a company cantina but not at the end of a "4 course dinner" that costs almost 800NOK per person without drinks included.

Reply 4.4: Your policy is not written anywhere a customer can read so we didn't know to request anything. We did, however, tell our waiter, the less smiling turkish guy, that the dishes were salted wrong, to which he shrugged. We also left both the tzatziki and the blue mussels uneaten, no comments from him. In addition we did ask for the meat course twice, to which he replied that "everyone is waiting".

We visited on Saturday, 2.4. Reservation wasn't in my name but if you want "proof", check for a payment of 1860NOK at 21.57...

Marked as LGBTQ+ friendly. That’s a joke. During the pride celebration yesterday my friend got chased off after sitting down because of chronic foot pain. They did not get asked to buy something. They had dressed for the pride occasion and looked queer. Our other friend who was dressed in all black did not get told to leave. When I asked what seemed to be the manager for a chair as my injured friend was sitting on the ground I was told “no you can’t have a chair”. Talked to another waiter and she again told me no and asked us to tell the people standing on a bench to leave instead. She then ran up to a dad and her daughter watching the parade and dragged them down. She then yelled in my face “now use the bench! I didn’t have to do that for you, but I did it anyway” and then stormed off. I walked up to the manager looking guy and asked him if we could talk. He then shouted in my face that he would not give me a chair. I told him it was not about the chair but how he talked to me and my friends. He then screamed in my face in front of customers “go away now! We don’t want you or your friends here”! Can’t believe I lowkey got hate crimes by a so called LGBTQ+ friendly restaurant, during the pride celebration and parade in Oslo.

Would not support them at any cost. Nasty staff and not friendly to queer looking people at any point. I don’t care how stressed you are about serving the more “straight looking” people. If you can’t handle the stress and have to be rude about it to queer people, you should NOT work in a...