Casa Carmen Alcalá — Restaurant in Madrid

Restaurant and outside seating is lovely. The waiter wouldn’t slow down long enough to take our order, he was trying to dictate what we were having, we weren’t offered a chance to see the full menu, we were just planning g on tapas and a drink. He made it clear we had to choose a first course,second course and a desert. So we did my husband asked for a beer, a Tinto for me and a bottle of water, water. They bring a large bottle of water to the table but it takes asking 3 servers to get us glasses for it. The salad came in a timely manner then we waited and waited for the main course. Wonderful potatoes and steak that I could have used as shoe leather. My husband never got offered another drink, he was served in the smallest glass while those around us got the larger beers. Everyone around us continued to be served, Tables came and went while we were waiting for our shoe leather steak. steak. Finally we were offered our desert, we were told there was only one type, interesting as many others were offered to the other tables. The final straw after being there 2 and 1/2 hours they brought our mango sorbet but no spoons. We waited another 20 minutes watching it melt when we had enough asked for the check, then he argued about that. We got check, paid and left our melting mango sorbet. We have visited Spain 12 times. We love the people , the history, and the amazing food. This is the only restaurant in Spain We have ever rated badly. We did notice the table next to us also getting nonexistent service. They were also from the US. If you don’t want Americans in your establishment just put up a sign. We will...

We were able to book an on-line reservation for the evening on a Saturday (3/22/25) at Casa Carmen at Alcala. We were pleased to be fit in. The restaurant has lots of space which is nice compared to some of the overly busy, tight and loud other restaurants close by on the plazas near the Prado. We had been eating Spanish specialties every night for many days and so it was good to see a variety of food offered. The four of us shared two starter salads, one with goat cheese and one a house salad. One son shared a seafood paella with my husband, my other son loved his chicken tikka, and I liked the pasta with meat and cheese. The menu called it cannelloni, the receipt called it manicotti, and I would call it lasagna since it was flat noodles with layers of meat and cheese. Leticia was our waitress and although she apologized for her English, combined with our Spanish, we all understood each other and everything we ordered came in good time and good form. She was helpful when we needed it, even though she had many tables and people to cover. We also tried a 'texture of chocolate' (a brownie with crumble top and chocolate ice cream on top) and cheesecake with raspberry sorbet for desserts. Both were good. We were pleasantly surprised and believe Casa Carmen at Alcala deserves a higher...

We went for lunch on Saturday and were somewhat entertained/somewhat horrified by the chaos of the service here. Even by Spanish standards the service was poor. I will say the staff were polite and even earnest which is not something to be taken for granted, but overall the serving staff were comically incompetent. We had three plates we ordered that simply never arrived, despite multiple inquiries we gave up after waiting an hour. To their credit they did not appear on our bill though I suspect this is because our server simply never put them in. We requested some cheese for a pasta dish, which they noted would be an extra charge (?) and which did finally arrive after 25 minutes but by which time we’d given up and eaten the plate before it got cold. The gyoza were served cold which I’ve never seen before. The croquettes were mostly room temperature which I do not believe was intentional and which think demonstrates the disconnect between the floor and the kitchen. Several of the serving staff were openly arguing with one another in plain view of our table. All in all we had a fine lunch, the food was nothing special but fine, and the atmosphere was decent but the total chaos of the serving staff certainly left...