Al Fresco Rooftop Wine Bar — Restaurant in San Juan

This is going to be a long review because we got scammed here on New Year’s Eve and want to share our story.

For New Year’s Eve, we made a reservation at this restaurant. Our expectations were simple – some nice tapas, a glass of champagne… a pleasant last evening of 2024. When we arrived at 8:30 PM, we were told that the kitchen had already closed and they were offering a New Year’s dinner with three courses, fireworks, good music, and champagne for $180 for two people.

Unfortunately, we accepted the deal because we figured there was nowhere else to go. The food and reviews looked good online, so we thought it would be worth the money. We couldn’t have been more wrong.

After being seated, we weren’t served anything for over an hour. Around 10 PM, we were finally asked if we wanted the champagne – which came in two plastic cups and was indeed not champagne but cheap sparkling wine. The water we ordered came in bottles without glasses.

The first course, served on paper plates, was an untoasted toast sandwich with some pesto. The second course consisted of toothpicks with cheese and tomato. Then, they brought us a plate with a bit of rice, some noodle salad, dry chicken, and something that smelled like fish – though we couldn’t tell what it was. Overall, the food was cold, terrible, and the portions were as small as the appetizers.

By that point, many people had already left, and we decided to leave as well. We were prepared to pay for the wine and maybe a small portion of the food, but not $90 per person. That was insane!

When we were ready to pay, the price had suddenly increased to $250! After a lot of arguing, we paid less, but still far too much for this disaster of an evening.

The only good thing that night was the DJ – a nice and cool guy with a great set. Even he seemed to have problems with the host. We overheard her demanding that he play Christmas music… we hope he got paid for the gig in the end, but...

I’ve never felt more shamed (I guess that is the word??) for ordering food at a restaurant?? We were seated very quickly by a super nice bartender who gave us a menu. About 10 min went by and the server walked over and grabbed the menu, but didn’t ask us what we wanted?? Another 10 min went by and we finally were able to get his attention and said we wanted to order. He said immediately “food is going to take a while” and we said that was fine as we were meeting people and had a couple of hours. We start putting in our food order (we were planning on ordering 5 tapas.. which is normal for a tapas restaurant?) and after every one he kept saying “this is going to take a while this is going to take a while”. When we got to the 4th tapa he legitimately said “I need to go check if we can even serve this.” And walked away… the nice bartender brought our sangria a few min later, and at that point we asked to just cancel the entire order because clearly ordering food was not acceptable, and he never even came back to complete our order?? The craziest thing was a couple came in ~15 min after us, and when we were heading out shortly after finishing our sangria they had one of the appetizers we ordered delivered… it was very strange. There were only 4 tables of people for a total of 11 people. Not sure why we weren’t able to order food or why we were made to feel so bad about it, but it was just very strange!! The sangria was great and the bartender was very sweet and helpful so 3 stars it is. Hopefully next time if we return we can have a...

Food/drinks were expensive and very "meh." We got drunken mushrooms, which was really just soggy sautéed sliced mushrooms (small portion served with toothpicks) in some kind of Worcestershire based sauce. Like, I could have sautéed them better at my house, totally nothing special and definitely not for $16!! The mojitos were fine, then I ordered a Manhattan on the rocks without looking again at the menu (server had taken them) and it ended up being $17, and was very watered down because the server had forgotten about it. To top it off, we ordered waters as soon as we got there; the server just handed us two bottled waters, no glass or anything, for $3 each. It just felt kind of like... Can't we just have water in a glass at a wine bar? Is this a concession stand?

So, they happened to be understaffed when we got there, and the server/bartender was friendly and patient but clearly working very hard to keep up with the orders at that time, and shared with us that there were supposed to be two FOH staff but one was no-show. Nothing against the staff for that reason. I really just think the mushroom dish is criminal and should be taken off the menu.

The rooftop ambiance is pleasant but like... that's their thing. We went elsewhere in old San Juan after this and had much better experiences. I can't believe is...