Helgi's — Restaurant in Scotland

The only saving grace of this place is the cosy atmosphere and the fantastic serving staff - the woman and her son who served our drinks and took our order were lovely and personable and clearly excel at their jobs. Unfortunately, that is where the excellence ends. You would think that a full booked and busy restaurant on the popular harbour front area of Kirkwall, one of the biggest towns in Orkney, would be a sure thing. Guess again. “Creamy mushroom & spinach pasta” turned out to be flavourless, nearly ice cold, soggy penne pasta with barely seasoned macerated mushrooms and spinach slopped on top. The portion size was adequate, though slightly underwhelming, and the small bowl did nothing to add to the presentation. The “chipotle tofu salad” sounded tasty and original but turned out to be lightly fried, completely flavourless cubes of tofu (white in the middle, so no marination occurred, and that’s all it takes to make tofu taste good!) tossed on top of a handful of salad leaves. The katsu mayo was nice though. The starter of “risotto balls” was actually really tasty, but with three balls presented over a spoonful of salad, you would expect quality (as opposed to quantity!). Generally speaking, when you see small portion sizes you would expect qualify and superior flavour, to make up for the lack of quantity! Neither quality or quantity were present in this meal. I want to reiterate that the serving staff are amazing, and the young lad handled our complaint like a pro (politely and with grace), but apparently “cold and flavourless” didn’t warrant a free meal or even a discount, because we had touched our food - this was the excuse of the kitchen staff anyway. I’m not sure how a customer is supposed to know they’re disappointed in the flavour, temperature, and consistency of their food without trying it!? Eventually the server came back to say we could have a free desert or our drinks could be comped. That’s better. Not wanting to try any more of their food, we opted for comped drinks and made a hasty exit.

DO NOT EAT HERE. Just buy drinks, especially the “Harbourside Gin” cocktail, and tip your servers! That is...

I will prefix this review by saying we try hard to always give good reviews or none at all…but this is an exception. I really wanted to give Helgi’s a 5-star review after the good reviews I had seen elsewhere. But…..service was patchy, at best, and food was good but not great pub fare. The staff - three for bar and tables seemed overwhelmed and running around. yet customers waiting and waiting. This place is not big, so it’s not customer numbers. Watching them for awhile (and we had a LOT of wait time), we worked out they didn’t seem to have a proper system; all staff were doing bar, drinks, orders, serving, clearing, admin and bills. They need to have one person just on bar and drinks and one looking after the 5 downstairs tables and one on the upstairs tables. When we arrived, the more junior waitress/bar person - who was very friendly - completely ignored us after pointing out our reserved table. Serving others that arrived after us. Then disappearing upstairs…We eventually ordered drinks and meals from another staff member who came to do drinks at the bar. Food came fairly promptly. When we were ready to leave and asked for the bill, the more junior waitress/bar person said sure, will get it for you now. Then proceeded to do other jobs and disappear again. We again went to the bar to ask for/pay bill. Senior staffer apologised saying it had got busy. No it hadn’t, your place wasn’t full (there were empty reserved tables), you just didn’t have a good system. If you did, you could have processed our table a lot quicker - aka normal service levels - and catered for the other people that came and went, giving up on being served at the bar. If I was the owner of this place I’d be annoyed about the below oar service and lost business...

Ok Good things first , the food was great , starter and mains were cooked perfectly and beautifully presented , we had a window table upstairs so it was nice and quiet and had a lovely view over the harbour, unfortunately the service was terrible and considering how good it was in every cafe and restaurant we went into in our week on Orkney this was almost certainly an off day for the young lad who served us .He was surly and monosyllabic and didnt have the happy face you saw elsewhere in Kirkwall, almost impossible to know what he was muttering we followed him upstairs and then never saw him again for 20mins , we went down stairs to get a drink order raised and remind them they had customers upstairs , meal and drinks arrived and we enjoyed that but even though the lad was in the room serving others not once were we asked how it was or if we needed new drinks , just basic hospitality stuff , eventually we had to go downstairs to the bar to pay the bill as we werent going to get a second drink and thats a shame as the bar is quite cosy and it was our first night in Kirkwall but our waiter made the decisiion to go back to the bnb easier than it should have been ,all in all hopefully it was an off night from the staff as the food...