Restaurant La Côte — Restaurant in Zurich

I'll start with the positives. This is a cute place to eat in Zurich that serves an on-the-table grill you can cook your own meat on. The cuts of meat were good, and the grill was hot. That's it.

The staff: I'm fairly used to the cold service you receive in Zürich having lived here 3 years, but these guys just didn't seem to want to be here at all. One waiter asked if a friend wanted a fill of wine, he said no, but he filled the glass anyway. Funny we laughed it off. Then I ordered a beer and he filled my glass with wine...

Our grill started smoking a bit more than usual I suppose and another staff member wearing glasses scolded us for "throwing food in the fire", which I can assure you we did nothing of the sort. A (very small) piece of meat must have fallen in, surely something they have to deal with on a daily basis. He removed the grill part with our meat on top, and replaced it with a (cold) new one, sans meat.

When there's a few grills going, this place gets STINKY. Sure, it'd be fine if you could open a window or something but in the middle of winter, and we walked out absolutely stinking.

The entree was a piece of 'marinated' eggplant. By marinated, I mean DRENCHED in vinegar. Inedible.

The salad after was some. Lettuce leaves retrieved from a bucket (I had a perfect view of the kitchen), with one half of a tomato and again, LOTS of vinegar.

Would I go back? No. Would I recommend it? Sure, if they change some of the menu...

The charbonnade is nice, and grilling it yourself makes for a nice atmosphere. I would have preferred something marinated or seasoned, but that's not what they're trying to do here, so I'm not drawing points for that. It's expensive, but it's Zürich and all-you-can-eat good meat, so I'm not drawing points for that either. The appetizer you get is drenched in enough vinegar to give you acid reflux, but it's free, seemingly, so I'm not drawing points for that either. The service on our visit was terrible, though. Mixing things up, forgetting orders, paying no attention, and at the end, piling meat onto our plates despite us saying no thanks, wasting a bunch of perfectly good pricy meat.

I don't regret coming here, but there are enough places to go in Zürich that I probably won't be back in a long...

Every restaurant in the area was packed on a Wednesday night, so we went to the first place that had space. Their terrace looked really nice and welcoming (also more breezy and comfortable than inside on a July evening), but we had to sit inside which was a bit stuffy. They brought water for our dog, the atmosphere was warm and homey, a bit oldschool. The prices/atmosphere made it seem like I personally didn't fit in, but the food was quite nice - meat tender (although a couple of my pieces were a bit tough), sauce delicious, fries crunchy but a bit salty.

The receipt was handwritten: we had the entrecote and a side of fries for two people (106 CHF) and "2x Bier" which was one beer and one coke (13.50 CHF). Service was ok, a bit...