Galata Olympos Restaurant — Restaurant in Istanbul

Tourist trap! The heat and our thirst led us be fooled by the extremely pushy restaurant staff into drinking 2 beers (1 each). One of the staff came and opened a bottle of water without our request (which he took away after I told him we didn’t want water) followed by a tray full of miniature appetisers without any name or price tag. The tray tricks you into thinking that they are only finger food and you order a couple of them without knowing that they’ll charge you twice the price of a main dish at a normal restaurant (for 1 small appetiser they charged 400tl). After sitting there for 30 minutes (that’s how long it took us to drink our beers and ‘taste’ the horrible finger food) we were slapped in the face with a 1000tl bill (240tl per 0.5L EFFES beer+ 400tl for the disgusting finger food+ 120tl for 15% service) . Only then I realised that I had made a huge mistake and walked into this trap by myself. If you are reading this, please avoid this place and all it’s neighbouring restaurants as they are all in cahoots! After I paid the bill, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and one of the staff approached my wife and asked her why she didn’t finish the finger food. My wife told him that she didn’t like the food in which the guys took the remaining food and dipped it in the sauce and ate it in front if her to make a point that the food was OK. Had I been there it wouldn't have happened! I don’t understand all the 5star reviews this place has since 200 meters from this place, there are other restaurants with equally bad food but at least with 1/4...

BAD BAD BAD Restaurant where they will Trik you and will take all your money!!!

We went to have a nice dinner/birthday party but we left with no money in our pokets.

They have a nice restaurant that at the begining looks expencive and elevated but they have shortcuts to everything and they have a scam doing on tourists. BE CAREFUL

-Water that we didn’t ordered served from 1.5 liters bottles was actually tap water poored into the bottles.

-The small restaurant was full of smoke, We were with a 2 year old girl and I was pregnant in 8 months, the smoking guys were the singers that worked for the restaurant.

-While we were there 3 guys started to sing and play instruments, come to our table, singing and asking “bakshish”/tips, from every guy from our table, even from the Birthday guy that we came to celebrate there. They were saying it lowd. Rude!

We asked for the guys from restaurant to sing happy birthday to the guy who was celebrating his birthday. They went far, bringing us a cake that we didn’t ask and a waiter fed celebrated guy with the cake. Weird!!!

-At the end we were charged way too much, they added in the paychecks that they didn’t even give us to see money for that tap water and the service, some were charged 10 aditional TL, some 15, some 25, we payed 40TL aditional. Probably they gathered from our group 200TL for tap water and service! This is robbery!

-The worst was that we were asked to pay for the Cake 150TL!!!! Really?!!! 😡

DON’T EVEN CONSIDER GOING...

Avoid this restaurant for the following reasons:

a) grossly inflated prices. b) quite bland food with little or no spice and flavour. My fish was literally just fried with no seasoning, I even actually had to put salt on it! The food of my friends which were either curries or other seafood dishes were also quite bad tasting. c) An extremely noisy musical act turned up and started singing near our table. I think some local guests may have enjoyed this, but we couldn't speak to each other or hear each other at all. You may think, why did we go into a restaurant with a musical act in? We didn't, a random act turned up off the streets. After we asked to be moved, the act was moved away for a little bit, only to return around 15 mins later. d) Very poor service, with food being taken away whilst we were still eating. It was then tipped into a common plate before we could even tell them we were still eating, and then the waiter just shrugged his shoulder and walked off. e) we were forced to pay a service charge when we tried to leave. We didnt want to because of the poor service, but the waiter then started shouting and refusing to let us leave without paying as he claimed it was a local 'local tax'. We checked this later with our hotel. There is no such thing as a local tax.

Most restaurants in Istanbul are very nice with excellent service, this is NOT one of them. Do yourself a favour...