BERTON — Restaurant in Bilbao

20230626: My son and I looked for a place to dine at about 7:30 pm, and we came across Berton in a touristy area of Bilboa. The restaurant has a bar and seating inside and out. We chose to be inside at a table.

We believe that our server was put off by our not speaking Spanish well and that we needed time to select main courses after we ordered wine and appetizers.

For appetizers, we had the Gaulic octopus and deep-fried balls of cheese and ham. These were delicious with the octopus cooked to be tender and not at all rubbery.

After a long wait to order entrées, my son chose the sirloin, and I ordered the Iberian Special, as recommended by our server. This turned out to be pork loin on a tabletop grill. Our entrées came out in a reasonable amount of time, and we both enjoyed our entrées.

After a very long time, our server returned and asked us about desserts. We ordered two made in the kitchen, a chocolate tart and one made with almond. We also ordered two espressos.

We guess the server either forgot about the espressos or expected they would be for after dessert. Anyway, we ate the desserts and then one espresso came. And so we ordered a second, which came quickly. This wasn't really a language issue since we know how to order coffee.

The timing issue we experienced could have been in part due to the place being busy, but we were in a visible spot; other tables turned over, and in total, we were probably there for 2.5 hours, so we believe we were just not important.

While we did enjoy the food, and our server helped us with good recommendations, making the order choices much quicker than without her help, we did not feel that Berton (65 Eur per person) was as good a value as the night before (49 Eur per person), when we had better dishes for less a few...

We went for a late dinner, had a table and waited quite long for an order to be taken. Sidre was served half a portion, literally just half of the glass without any explanation. Cost of a tiny piece of file (pil pil) codfish max 80 gr is 22 eu and when my son could not eat it bcs the filet was actually quite cheesy and not soft - no alternative offers or compliments offered. Pintxos bar is a disaster because a) you can not order it sitting at your table b) you ll wait in the line for 30-40 min 😭 The lady waitress was very polite, but an older man was absolutely unwilling to help, serve or talk even minor english -which left an impression of unfriendly attitude as we dis not really have a chance to order or explain what we...

Have been there before and was good in the past but extremely disappointed this time. We ordered Rabas at the time that wasn't particularly busy but many other people suddenly arrived and our order was given to the locals and were told that we were next but again our order was given to another customer and twice more. We had already paid so couldn't just go. By the time our Rabas turned up it was terrible and full of deep fried crust with almost nothing in it and oily. When I left I told the guy that served us it wasn't nice and he just smiled without care. My wife is Spanish so it wasn't like we didn't know anything at all about the food. I will...