Klara — Restaurant in Basel

Klara is a food court, a cantine, but not a restaurant. Think of it as an expensive McDonalds with slow food, alternative beverages and cheap decor. Individual food stalls sell world food, the quality is typically ok but overpriced. You can easily reach 25-30 CHF with just a main and a side. You have to fetch your food and bring your plates back. Drinks are sold at a central bar, so you need to take another trip from your table. Sadly, the drinks sold there are of the hipster kind with strange tea brands, local Colas, overpriced bad wine etc.. The rationale being that they enforce alternative choices. At Markthalle, another food court in Basel, every food stall is free to sell whatever drinks customers want. Here being alternative means there is no alternative. My colleagues do like the place though and we go there almost every week and spend collectively upwards of 200 CHF, food and drinks. I decided however once to bring my own can of Coke Zero since I was done with their alternative fake Cola and could not buy the real thing there. A waitress, or shall I say a surveillance guard, came out of nowhere and told me I needed to remove my can. She took it from the table abruptly. As I refused, she called the manager who threatened to call the police as I did not abide by the "restaurant's" rules. All of my colleagues had bought their drinks from Klara. So the staff basically destroyed a good lunch atmosphere by being extremely rude and aggressive for a can of Coca Cola !!! This is by no means a restaurant but merely a sad place selling overpriced hipster food in a shabby setting trying to make quick money by misreading Generation-Y values. Just try visiting the toilets downstairs and appreciate the cleanliness and smell to make yourself an opinion, I guess all the writings and tags on the wall are part of the...

Great place with very good, reasonably priced food (you order and the counter and fetch it later, in my experience they never take too long) . Coffee is excellent and the atmosphere very comfortable: roomy and spacious, nicely decorated. To give a downside, I don't understand why they don't hand out with the order one of those alarm devices that let you know when your food is ready at the counter, that'd be so much more comfortable. Also, they used to offer tap water for free, they don't any more (at the place in the bar counter where they use to a bottle of water for self service, they have now some flyers explaining how important it is to keep water resources on Earth... big LOL to this)

EDIT: (answering the owners) the big LOL is for the irony of making the access to free water more difficult precisely with advertisement of a campaign prising natural water :-) . Also, the japanese place in Klara does hand out the alarm device, with no noise. I find it more relaxing for the general ambiance that the other places that continuously yell names of dishes...

Hello to all, What to say about this place... It has everything you need everything you want considering drinking and eating snd having fun, mostly prefered by students young people and its almost always full in evenings. They have various food courts meaning cuisines from different countries for example one bruger house one Asian food stall etc... about 5 or 6 of them so you can choose what your appetite desires. The space is pretty big even outside its average! You can make parties go for a casual drink alcoholic or none, the lighting is pretty nice, it gives that homy feeling of warmth (maybe im being dramatic), anyways very popular palce to hang out for young and old i might say!!! I reccomend it for a morning coffee, for an afternoon snack or for a night hang out with your friends for whatever the...