Café de Grancy — Restaurant in Lausanne

It is rare to find a restaurant so badly managed with a staff overly arrogant and rude.

I went there with my dad for lunch.

The whole experience started with the restaurant half full with most table showing as reserved which on would think is a good sign that it must be popular.

So we got offered to share a table with other people as everything was reserved and there was no table for 2 available. The gentleman sitting next to us was waiting for his guest to arrive.

From that point onward it went down hill.

It tooked about quite a while for the waitress looking after 4 tables to finally take our drink order.

At that point the man next to us reminded the waitress that he was still waiting for his drink he ordered 15 min ago.

This was really the sign of things to come.

The guest of our table neighbour finally arrived about 5 min after we have ordered our food.

All our order were cold dishes. I ordered a melon and melon and ham salad for starter and a steak tartar for main while my dad was having only the same salad as me but as a main.

By miracle our neighbours hot food ordered after us managed to appear 10min before my salad starter.

Usually you will have some sort of apologies for the waiting but nothing of the sort here.

Let's talk about the food. The melon and ham salad was good as the chef as nothing really to do here. But be aware simply order it a starter as if you order it as a main you will just have two leaf of salad more but no more melon or ham.

Call me old fashioned but when you order a steak tartar I like to be asked how I like it. Here you get thrown what ever the chef decided. With the only offer to bring tabasco to make it hotter.

The meat was not the nicest not very lean as it's clear they do not invest in high quality ingredients.

We decided that we would still have a dessert. So after requesting the dessert menu that we received immediately. We waited 10min to order after that point we decided we had enough and we were in the end have dessert somewhere else.

When leaving we noticed that from all the tables reserved still 6 or 7 tables were still showing as reserved despite clearly no one was coming given it was past 1.30pm.

When leaving another waiter asked how it went so my dad told him he was not impressed to have been lied to about the tables. He came up with an excuse that all of a sudden he had to keep all the tables indoor free if he had to bring people in case of rain.

Seems reasonable but so if we had accepted one of the two table free outside we would have had a table indoor? They never mentioned it when we came in. When my dad try to explain the issue with his reasoning and the fact he was not upfront with us when we came in.

At that point the waiter started shouting at my dad that he was not able to understand properly. And I am being polite in the way I'm depicting the scene.

But the truth is that they are trying to create their own hype by trying to appear busier and more popular than they are. With so many options in Lausanne you will have no issues to find better food and...

This rather eclectic restaurant/bar/cafe seems very nice from the outside and apparently very popular on all sort of websites. However I have to say that i can not recommend it, or agree with all the comments I have read online. It's more a hype place to score a photo on Intagram. The menu is boing, the food is plain and the service is REALLY slow.

The reviews mostly comments on the friendly atmosphere and the central location, to be fair, it's a bit hidden away but only 5 minutes walking from the central train station. During my stay in Lausanne I've visited the cafe several times, only to find it either full, or that we have to share the same table with other customers. the Cafe's clienteles are a mix from young hipsters to mama with trolley, to elders, which is a fun experience for me. The part that really made the cafe not pleasant to me is the service. It always took forever for the waitress to come to you. Once you are in the cafe, no one would come and welcome you, so you will always have to ask around other customers to see if you can share their table. The time it takes for you to get menu, order food and finally get whatever you orders it way...

I have had private and business lunches and dinners in this cosy brasserie for more than 10 years. I have been almost always satisfied, except perhaps for the noise that in some evenings made conversations difficult. However, over the past one to two years the quality of food gradually and persistently deteriorated. Yesterday the risotto was served almost cold, it detached in blocks from the dish, and the shrimps were chewy; the ice cream arrived to our table half melted in its cup. At least the price did not change much over the past two years ;-) I hope that they will get back to their high standards soon -- there are many other great and causal restaurants in the neighbourhood and I won't go back to this one for...